All the Mistakes Your Anxiety Convinces You to Make

Anxiety is more than an emotional and mental state. It’s an experience that can force you to make a lot of mistakes.

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What does your life look like when you’re anxious? For most of us, everything turns into pandemonium. Our thoughts become chaotic, our bodies become tense. It can feel like an impossible task to find your center or a base of optimism and hope. That’s why we make so many mistakes when we’re anxious.

Part of breaking our cycles — whether that’s in relationships, family, or even careers — requires that we learn to work with things like our anxiety. We have to get out of our own way, acknowledge the mistakes that we’re making, and try to do better by ourselves and our futures.

The mistakes we make when we’re anxious.

Mistakes don’t come as a surprise to anyone with a genuine anxiety problem. Whether you’ve been battling it for years, or you’re just getting started on your anxiety journey, you’ll understand how your anxiety can corner into acting and reacting in some strange ways. Acknowledging these mistakes is key. Once you see how you’re being negatively impacted, you can change it for yourself.

A goal-oriented approach

How do you approach your day? Do you spend most of your time focusing on getting things done with specific goals? How much time do you spend doing things that are strictly for enjoyment in the present moment? This is called goal-oriented living vs. process-oriented living. One is all about accomplishing goals, and the other is about living in the moment.

When we’re anxious, we become obsessively focused on eliminating your anxiety or lowering it. This puts us in a goal-orientated state of mind, which creates more anxiety and pressure for you to come up with solutions fast. Process-oriented is a better place to be in anxiety. Being in the present moment allows you to anchor yourself in safety and see things more clearly.

Avoidance as self-care

One of the worst things about anxiety is the intense energy it feels you up with. Once you feel anxious, you’re like to get up and start looking for solutions to remove the anxiety and make yourself “safe” again. The problem lies in choosing the path of avoidance as your main solution. You can’t afford life in order to avoid anxiety.

Sometimes the best thing we can do is to lean into self-care in times of intense anxiety. Some of us do the opposite. We avoid taking care of ourselves; we avoid doing anything that may trigger more anxiety. That’s often when you need to lean in. Moments like this can be a powerful time to set boundaries and to focus on getting what you actually need.

Focusing on the dark side

How would you rate the quality of your thoughts when you’re battling your anxiety? The point of our anxiety is to keep us safe from danger. Your brain and the rest of your nervous system are frantically analyzing your environment for further threats. While your anxiety feels bad, it’s your body’s screwy attempt to protect you.

All that same, you can’t feed into the negative thoughts that come with such anxiety. Focusing on all the bad things that might happen (or not) you turn the rest of your thoughts equally negative. This further affects your mood and your behavior. When all you can focus on is the negative side of what you’re experiencing, you create more of that negative or hurtful behavior.

Creating fact from fiction

Anxiety thoughts are big thoughts. All of our doubts and insecurities are triggered. In that moment of high tension or outright panic, it can feel you’re in the worst place in the world. Your brain tells you that you’re at the end. It’s not the end, however. You’re making a major mistake by believing all the crazy things your brain tells you in the middle of an anxiety attack.

Negative reinforcement

Being anxious feels anything but nice. Your brain is stressed and overworked. It runs through a million nightmare scenarios and works the rest of your nervous system into a panic. It can be overwhelming and it can confuse us too. So confusing, in fact, that some make the mistake of punishing themselves for their anxiety.

The negative reinforcement doesn’t work, though. Beating yourself up or punishing yourself for being anxious doesn’t lessen your anxiety. Actually, it increases your anxiety. The better approach is to come from a place of compassionate understanding. Learn to communicate with your anxiety rather than punishing yourself for having it.

Looking to lay the blame

Blame games come up a lot for people who deal with major anxiety. It’s understandable. When you’re feeling panicked or low, you want to identify the causes. The mistake, however, comes into play when you make the people around you responsible for your anxiety.

You see this mistake made time and time again in those whose anxiety overwhelms their emotional intelligence. They can expect other people to make them feel better. Some even lay the full blame for their chronic anxiety at the feet of others.

Destroying personal limits

Where does the line get drawn with you? How do you set limits with your friends and family? How do you set limits for yourself? We all have boundaries, but it’s hard to remember that when you’re in the throes of anxiety. This is often just when we need to have the most strength, though. When we’re anxious, we’re more likely to destroy our own personal limits — instead of standing strongly beside them.

Super-personalization

When we’re anxious, our nervous system is basically worked into a state of panic. Your brain creates the belief that you aren’t safe, and then it reacts. In that state, it becomes hyper-aware of your environment. It scans everything for potential dangers, and in that process can (wrongly) start super-personalizing everything that happens to it.

That’s a mistake, though. Not everything that you experience reflects you. Good or bad, things just happen. We can’t take responsibility for everything, nor can we relate everything in our environment to our personal worth. When you get space from your anxiety, you can more clearly see the separation between you, your behavior, and your value as a person.

How to curb the pitfalls of anxiety…

It’s important that you don’t minimize your anxiety or the effects it has on your life. Avoiding or running from our anxiety is one of the worst things we can do to ourselves. If we want to skip some of the major pitfalls our anxiety presents for us, then we have to learn how to face and navigate it…instead of burying it all away or allowing it to take over.

Unmanaged, anxiety can impact our ability to make healthy decisions for ourselves. Namely, it can affect:

Our need for control
Unstable emotions
Sense of self-worth
Courage to confront
Impulse control
What-if thinking

If you allow it, your anxiety will derail your life. Be compassionate with yourself and look at how your anxiety is upsetting the goals and missions you have for your future. Get professional help, just as you would for a physical medical issue. See the link between your emotions, your anxiety, and the behaviors that make up the whole of your life and relationships.

Find some creative outlets for yourself and focus on honest self-expression. Lookout for your triggers, build up the courage to address and manage them (instead of running away from them).

Anxiety is big, and it is scary, but it doesn’t have to be. We can learn to relate to our anxiety in different ways, and we can find different ways to navigate it. Create safe routines for yourself and then create time to see to your mental and emotional wellbeing.

Question yourself and your anxiety, but foster a greater sense of acceptance more than anything else. It’s time for you to look your fears right in the face and finding the courage to act despite them.

E.B. Johnson is a top-writer, coach, and podcaster who specializes in narcissistic family abuse and recovery. With over two-decades of abuse recovery experience, she’s made it her mission to help others free themselves from the shadows of narcissistic abuse.

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