Building Your Inner Friendship: A Remedy for High Functioning Anxiety
Article Published for The Vital Creative Collection, Written by Charlotte Jade Askew
Photo by Nati-Melnychuk
We are afraid. Afraid of what’s coming, what might come, what’s already passed, what they say, what they didn’t say. Anxiety, at its core, is our effort to predict, control, and conform to what we perceive as regular, usual, or normal. The familiarity that is our sense of safety. It’s our brain's answer to keeping us connected, infused with the constant subconscious strive for survival.
In anxiety, at the foundation, we are entertaining fear for the self. The idea that we won’t be able to cope with the inevitable unknowns, our imagined outcomes and events. To manage that fear, our brain tries to predict. It subscribes to the naïve but well-intentioned belief that if we can predict everything, we can make a plan for everything, and if we can make a plan, we’ll avoid the perceived discomfort or pain that we are predicting. It’s an inner merry-go-round, and it’s making us sick.
Photo by Nicole Herrero
We cannot predict everything. We won’t always get it right, and even if we do, our plan won’t always work. As it is, we make the plan and then worry about the different outcomes of the plan, and then try to plan for the plan. So, the very thing we’re doing to ease our fear contributes to it. No wonder we’re exhausted!
The truth is, predicting, planning, and controlling provide minimal and temporary relief, ultimately contributing to the inner chatter that weighs us down. Real freedom lies in the power to be okay when all is not okay, because the unknown isn’t going anywhere. Your strength lies in the self-assurance to stand in your truth, knowing that you cannot know what will come, but trusting yourself to handle it regardless. That is liberation.
So, how do you get off this all-consuming, vertigo-inducing merry-go-round?
Photo by Apostolos Vamvouras
Step One: Cultivate Your Inner Friendship
Think about someone you trust; someone you could tell your most embarrassing experience to and feel heard and held in that story. I can almost guarantee one of the qualities you love about them, and probably the cornerstone piece to the trust you have built with them, is the compassion with which they respond to you. You can tell them that difficult thing and they don’t shame you, they don’t poke fun, and they don’t berate you or judge. They respond with empathy and acceptance: “I’ve been there, we all mess up, I get it.”
Self-trust begins with cultivating that kind of compassionate relationship within. The way you talk to yourself needs to be in the manner of a very close friend. When you make mistakes or you’re facing something difficult, offer yourself kindness. Intentionally talk to yourself in a way that lays a fertile ground for trust: “Hey, this is hard, you’re trying your best and that’s enough.”
If you live with an inner bully, a voice that is full of critique and judgement, you won’t want to trust yourself, and I mean, why would you? Take your inner chatter off autopilot and start consciously developing a friendship with yourself.
Photo by Jasmin Chew
Step Two: Listen to Your Inner Nudge
Often, we know something before we really know it. There’s a feeling we sometimes stamp down and suffocate. A sign or a message, a gut inclination. Whatever you want to call it, we have an innate knowledge that if tapped into, supports us to make the choices that resonate most with what we need at the time.
Research has shown that our bodies sense things before we do. When we ignore these little nudges, we create a disconnection in our minds and body that leads to a lack of trust in ourselves. In ignoring our inner knowing, we are turning away from the innate guidance we are instilled with at birth. The disconnection breeds confusion and cognitive dissonance, a misalignment that results from our actions differing from our beliefs and values. We struggle in the absence of clarity, unable to make choices in alignment with who we innately are and lacking a sense of trust in our judgements.
Get quiet with yourself, hush the chatter in your mind using meditation and mindfulness strategies, and turn inward. Tune in and pay attention to what comes up when you try to get quiet. Coming back to yourself in this way is how you get back onto the frequency that allows you to communicate with that inner guidance. Self-trust is built in this resonance with our true selves.
Photo by Feteme Fuentes
Step Three: The Other Side of Comfort
We live in a society that is more and more advocating for a life of comfort. We are taught to expect everything to be fun, fast, and easy. To not put ourselves out too much and to stay where it's safe.
However, what we lose in staying where we feel comfortable, is the inner trust that we can cope when we’re not comfortable. With everything fun, fast and easy, we have no idea how to be when things are upsetting, slow, and hard. The only way we learn we can get through something difficult is to go through it. If someone tells us, we’ll be okay and we can cope, it doesn’t sink in or become truth for us because we don’t trust that we can. We haven’t seen ourselves do it.
If we travel through the muck and mud that is the ‘stuff’ of challenge outside our comfort zone, we have very visceral proof that we can get through hard things. We teach our mind and body that we can survive the challenge, and the by-product of that is trusting ourselves to get through the next challenge. So, when life inevitably throws something hard our way, we innately trust that we can stride out into it and come through the other side.
You can start teaching yourself this today by doing something that gets you feeling a little anxious or uncomfortable. You don’t have to go all out right away. Start small and build up your tolerance slowly, the same way you’d start with less weight at the gym to build your muscle mass. The key is to choose something that makes you feel the ‘ick’ but not something that absolutely cripples you. Try taking a cold shower, going out in public to eat alone, or signing up for a group class with strangers.
Building self-trust is a crucial life skill and the healing antidote to anxiety. Trusting yourself is embodying the inner knowing that you are powerful beyond measure. It is confidence in your abilities, your choices and your judgement. You have your own back, you stand in your power, and you advocate for yourself. Walking through life like that is transformative and will change the way you relate to the world and everyone in it.
Photo by Mathilde Langevin
Be mindful that this is a process. Offer yourself kindness along the way and practice patience. Trust isn’t built in judgement and nastiness. Hold your own hand on this journey. Leaving anxiety behind is the evolution of stepping into your truest self.
—Charlotte Jade Askew, In-House Writer at Casey Jacque
Instagram: @inner_chatter
