The Anxiety Trap: Why Fighting Makes It Worse

For most of my adult life I had a low-level hypervigilance running in the background. I tried to fight it with books, breathwork, control techniques, willpower. The harder I fought, the worse it got.

In this episode I share the breakthrough that came when I stopped fighting and started welcoming. It is a Stoic and Nietzschean reframe called amor fati, the love of fate, and it changed my relationship with anxiety.

We get into the two layers of suffering and why fighting anxiety creates the second one, what Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus understood about welcoming difficulty, why Nietzsche called amor fati the formula for greatness, the Stoic idea of indifferents and why anxiety is not bad in itself, and a daily practice for treating anxiety as a training partner rather than an enemy.

Watch the video version: youtu.be/cY4AMcWhSko

Sources: Marcus Aurelius, Meditations (Hays); Epictetus, Discourses and Enchiridion (Hard); Nietzsche, The Gay Science; Donald Robertson, How to Think Like a Roman Emperor.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:18

I struggled with anxiety for most of my adult life. Not the kind of anxiety that you see in movies hyperventilating in a bathroom, freaking out, having insane panic attacks, although I did have a few, but the kind of anxiety that keeps you up at night or makes you want to leave a situation just because you have this impending fear of something happening. I remember when I was living in the Czech Republic and I would be walking around the streets and there'd be armed guards and my mind would play tricks like, what if they just decided to shoot me? Or I'd be on a tram and someone would leave a bag on the train and I would think, well, what if that's a bomb? And it would make me actually want to get off the tram. It would give me this fear that would feel so real. It would give me this impulse to act and to leave the situation. If I was in a barn and a little fight would break out, I would feel like I'm going to be somehow involved in this fight and hit and hurt and killed. If I'm walking down the street and there's a dog, I now imagine that this dog's going to attack me. So my mind would play these kinds of tricks on me, this sort of low-level hyper-vigilance that would be there, and it was very uncomfortable, to be honest. And I read a lot of books, watched a lot of YouTube videos, and I spent a lot of time fighting my anxiety. I saw it like this intruder in my system that I needed to get out, to remove, to control, to breathe through it. And so I kept fighting it. And eventually I hit a breakthrough that changed everything. I discovered that the fight was the problem, not the anxiety, but the fight. Now I'm not going to tell you that anxiety feels good because it doesn't. I'm going to talk about something that the Stoics understood 2,000 years ago that now modern neuroscience is catching up to. And that is that the more you resist an internal state, the stronger it becomes. When your brain first registers anxiety, you get the tightness in your chest, sort of clenching feeling, the nod in your stomach, the desire to escape, to run away. And then you resist it. You say to yourself, this is bad. It is bad that I'm feeling anxious. And now you have two layers of suffering. You have the anxiety, and now you have the anxiety about the anxiety. And oftentimes the second layer is even worse than the first. And secondly, because you're fighting the anxiety so hard, you're showing your nervous system that there must be a real threat. There's a reason why you're fighting. So the cortisol and the tension and the stress amps up. So you have these two layers of suffering, anxiety, then the anxiety about being anxious, and now you're convincing your nervous system that this is real, the anxiety should be here, and you need to fight against it. But what if I told you there's a completely different way to approach this? There's a way of getting out of the anxiety track that a lot of us spend years in without realizing that there's even a door. So here's the radical question I have for you. What if instead of fighting your anxiety, you welcomed it? I don't mean just low-level acceptance, gritted your teeth and accepted it being there, but actually wanted your anxiety to be there. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had a phrase for this called amorfati, which means the love of fate. He called this the formula for greatness in human beings. And the idea is that instead of just accepting life, we fully and wholeheartedly embrace it, all of it, even the bad parts, every aspect of our fate we fully embrace and choose to love because it is here, because the past is unchangeable, it is not within our control, and the present moment as we find it right now in this instant is also unchangeable. Nietzsche wasn't a stoic, but the roots of Amofati trace back to the ancient Stoics. For example, Epic Titus said, Do not seek for things to happen as you wish, wish for things to happen as they do, and you will go on well. He didn't say just tolerate what happens, he said to wish for it, to want it, to choose it, even though on some level it's been chosen for you, you choose it again for yourself voluntarily. Marcus also took it further in a way with his famous line The impediment to action advances action, what stands in the way becomes the way. He wrote that a blazing fire makes use of whatever is thrown into it. It doesn't accept it, it converts it and transmutes it into fuel. A fire doesn't burn away complaining about the things that it's burning, it instead just grows bigger and stronger and brighter no matter what is put into it. And so the question is, what happens if we take this frame, this principle, this practice, amor fati, and we point it at our anxiety? I started experimenting with this about five years ago. I was on a retreat in Costa Rica and I was having a bit of a difficult time. And instead of fighting against the anxiety that I was feeling and telling myself to think more positively, to breathe through it, to just be more mindful of it, I instead asked myself the question, what would happen if I became grateful for this experience? What if I actually wanted my anxiety to be here? What if I welcomed it in and asked it to stay? A part of me thought this was absurd, why would I do this? But then as I actually did it, I felt less anxious. The anxiety softened, and I felt more compassionate actually towards myself and my relationship towards the anxiety. I actually felt that the anxiety was there to help me rather than harm me. Did the anxiety completely did the anxiety completely go? Not quite, but it definitely lessened, and now I felt more in control. I was less dominated by the anxiety, and I could choose my next response. Instead of feeling hijacked and forced to act in a certain way by my fears, I now could choose my next response in a way that felt more aligned to my values. And here's how I think about it from a stoic perspective, and something that I talked about in a previous video on discipline. The Stoics divided the world into three categories good, bad, and indifferent. They said that the only thing that is truly good is excellence of character or virtue, courage, justice, temperance, wisdom, and the only thing that is bad is vice or corruption of character, which would be foolishness, injustice, excess, and cowardice. Everything else was indifferent body, health, relationships, pleasure, pain, status, reputation, possessions, etc. These external indifference were not things you shouldn't care about, or things that didn't mean anything, but rather they were not intrinsically good or bad, like vice and virtue are. Rather, it was more about what you did with them that mattered. And so you can apply this framework to anxiety as well. Is anxiety good or bad? No, it's neither. It's technically an indifferent. What matters is what you do with it. So when anxiety comes, you ask the question, does this harm my character or does it help my character? Well, it depends. You can use the anxiety as fuel on the fire to develop your character, as another obstacle to work with instead of fighting. What if anxiety can actually train you in virtue like courage and temperance and justice and wisdom? Suddenly now, anxiety is a great source of practice, something to be grateful for instead of something to get rid of. And this is where amor fati comes in. Acceptance would say, I have anxiety, I'm okay with having anxiety, I accept it being there. I'll just let it be. Okay, that's acceptance of anxiety. And that's pretty good. It's a lot better than having this war with yourself, this internal battle within your own mind. But amorfati asks us to go further. Amofati asks us to say, I have anxiety and I'm glad to have anxiety. I welcome it being here. It's my training ground and my friend and guardian, and it keeps me safe, and I would never do without it. I'm so lucky to have anxiety. This is not said in a toxic positivity way, right? Like, oh yay, I'm suffering. This is great. It's more like a boxer having a good sparring partner. You don't want a sparring partner just to be punched in the face. You have a sparring partner to teach you how to defend yourself, how to move, how to strike, how to counter. And anxiety can be that very thing for you, or any difficult emotion, including things like anger and sadness and so on. So you start seeing anxiety as something that ultimately can help you, can help you train. It's a sparring partner, and life is a gym that you can show up to and train and get better every day. When you practice amorfati regularly, something miraculous can happen. You can start feeling gratitude for all sorts of difficult emotions. And I actually think that the ancient Stoics saw their emotions like this. If they would get frustrated or they'd have an obstacle or they'd have some kind of challenge, they would see it literally as a form of training, emotional training, something that they can work with and practice. And if you start applying amorfati to your own anxiety, you'll get rid of that second layer of suffering, the anxiety about the anxiety, and you'll find that you recover a lot more quickly from the initial surge of anxiety. I'm not saying that you're never going to feel anxiety again, because part of the point I'm making is that anxiety is not necessarily bad in the first place, right? It's indifferent. It's there to show you something or to teach you something. Part of the problem with anxiety is how we relate to it. If we've spent years trying to get rid of it, trying to push it down. The analogy that I like to use is we're in a house and we have a guard dog, and that guard dog is barking and barking and telling us that there's a threat. And instead of listening to that dog and welcoming the dog and feeding the dog and taking care of the dog and training the dog, we instead shout at the dog and we put the dog in a cage and we lock it in a different room. Do you think that dog is going to bark more or is it going to bark less? Well, I think that it would probably bark more at the wrong times. The alarm system isn't going to be working as well as it should be because we're not taking care of something that is ultimately trying to take care of us. So the practice for today and something you can do as anxiety keeps showing up. The next time you feel that stirring of anxiety, maybe it's familiar to you. Instead of trying to breathe through it, instead of trying to push it away, instead of trying to control it or think other types of thoughts, you instead say, I see you and I welcome you, and you're okay to stay. Show me what you want to show me. I'll listen. And you say this. And then you can also start incorporating other elements of amalfati and literally say to your anxiety, I'm glad you're here. You will be my training partner today. You might be surprised what happens. I'd love to hear from you in the comments about your experience of trying this exercise. The mantra that I use quite a lot if I have anxiety is, I see you anxiety. Thank you for being here, but I'm okay, I don't need you right now. It's just a little acknowledgement and a reminder that I'm okay. That way I'm kind of honoring it and still seeing it as a friend, as something that is welcome, but just not really needed in this moment.