On Stress and Anxiety: Part 2 —Dressing for the Weather

In Part 1, I told the story of a phone call that lasted two minutes and the self-criticism that lasted four days.

The stressor was real and brief: thirty-eight managers waiting for me in a hotel meeting room, and me, oblivious, on my deck in shorts.

The anxiety was much older, rooted in a family standard I had carried since childhood: I must always be reliable, always there, never the one who lets people down.

I ended with my hiking friend's line: “There's no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing.”

Anxiety is the weather. Our response is the clothing.

So what does the clothing look like?

Don't try to eliminate anxiety, manage it

Anxiety is part of being human. Chronic anxiety develops when our alarm system stays activated well beyond the immediate threat.

Anyone who promises a technique that will make you perpetually calm has oversimplified the problem.

What can change, slowly, is how easily you are set off, how intensely you react, and how quickly you recover.

The central move is simple to state and hard to do: know and manage yourself rather than trying to manage everyone else.

Here are four places to start.

Learn about your own family

Notice who reacts to whom, where conflicts erupt, who worries, who withdraws, who over-functions, and what your own automatic response is when tension rises.

Observing patterns rather than blaming people changes what you see. Anxiety doesn't simply reside in the “difficult person.” Everyone participates in the system.

In my case, I eventually began asking, “Where did I learn that making a mistake makes me unacceptable?”

That question led back to my position as the oldest sibling and the job I had taken on, and been handed, of being the one who could always be counted on.

Once I could see that role as something I had inherited rather than something I was, the self-attack lost some of its authority.

Distinguish thinking from feeling

Chronic anxiety displays itself in automatic responses:

You fix and rescue when nobody asked you to.

You become instantly defensive when criticized.

You correct people and offer advice they didn't request.

You feel angry and automatically look for someone to blame.

The work is to notice the emotional pull, decide what you actually think, identify what you are responsible for, and act accordingly.

I was responsible for missing the session, apologizing, and making it right.

I was not responsible for proving to myself, over four days, that I was still a good person. That kind of self-judgment kicks in so fast I sometimes don't even realize it's happening.

My automatic self-criticism was one expression of my anxiety.

Take a clear position

Managing yourself means learning to define yourself without fighting, capitulating, or trying to convince.

The discipline is to state clearly what you will and will not do, while staying connected to people who may disagree.

This doesn't guarantee that anxiety will drop. Sometimes it does the opposite. When one person changes his or her part in an established pattern, others may push harder to restore the old arrangement.

The challenge in taking a clear position is to resist both appeasing and counterattacking.

The position I eventually took with myself was simple:

“I made a mistake. I am going to correct it, and I am not going to punish myself for a week.”

Taking a position means knowing what you think and believe, and remaining responsible for yourself when others push back.

Manage yourself, not others

Notice how easily you assume responsibility for what other people think, feel, say, do, or fail to do.

The founder who predicts catastrophe for the next generation, the daughter who cannot decide without consulting her mother's mood, the brother who has carried a sibling for decades - none will solve the problem by trying harder to change the other person.

Each can change his or her own part, and only that part.

After my mistake, I could not control how my client would react. Her response belonged to her.

Mine belonged to me.

This takes time

Exercise, sleep, meditation and other practices can help regulate our physiology. But learning to manage ourselves in the presence of anxiety requires something more difficult: changing how we function in our most important relationships.

That doesn't happen quickly.

Real gains are measured in years and realized in your family, not just at work. The people closest to us have an uncanny ability to stimulate our reactivity.

The payoff of self-management is that you become less easily set off, recover more quickly when you are, and function more thoughtfully in anxious situations.

You cannot control the weather.

But you can get better at dressing for it.