Why “I Beat Anxiety” is a Terrible Title

This is not the right approach for anxiety.

Ditto for “Overcame,” “Conquered,” and “Escaped.”

Because I’ve been working on Beautiful Voyager for the past three years, nearly every day I receive a new trending anxiety article via text or Facebook messenger from a smart, well-read friend or family member. The piece usually looks like this:

Wall Street Journal, April 28, 2017

These headlines always make me groan. I know they are perceived as what will garner clicks, but they just cause more problems for readers. Whether the writers or editors chose the titles, this is often how anxiety articles are packaged.

The problem is: what gets clicks wends its way into hearts and minds. This framing will not help people who actually have anxiety. In fact, it will exacerbate the problem.

Those of us who have anxiety are always looking for answers. We google until our fingers are numb. We read every book we can find. We covertly study. We slyly interview. We believe that if we work hard enough, we will find a way to beat, escape, or conquer anxiety.

Look ma, more muscles!

Alas, all of this trying and searching is only adding to our anxiety. It is part of the problem, not the solution.

There is no path “out of” anxiety. If you have an anxiety disorder, like Andrea and I do, then like us, anxiety will likely be some part of your entire life.

Does this mean that you can’t be happy? No! You can find many ways to feel safe and comfortable with who you are, anxiety and all. But the false promise these headlines are selling in order to get your click — that you can no longer feel the pressure of anxiety if you just read what someone else did to work on theirs — is a lie. And it needs to stop.

Et tu, Psychology Today?

We all need to stand up to click-bait anxiety titles, but this critique is really aimed at my fellow writers.Ask yourself, “Do I really mean what I’m saying when I write ‘beat anxiety’? Or am I just wanting a dopamine hit from getting a bunch of clicks?”

If it’s the latter, then perhaps you, too, need to ride the wave and adjust your expectations.

Tandem surfing was actually a thing in the 60s.

What I want people with anxiety to know: you’re not alone in feeling confused. You don’t need to Arnold the situation to be OK. There are many tactics to try, but since no two anxieties are the same, what worked for others won’t always work for you. Keep experimenting and you will find calmer, happier shores.

And good luck on that wave!

Originally published in April 2017. Updated in September 2018.

Finding Other Voices

One of the things that starting this project is doing for me is helping me find the other people who are writing about anxiety in a way I can relate to. It's so great that we have tools to be able to connect with each other. I found the work of Lisa Scott aka TheWorryGames.com through Twitter. (If you're on Twitter, you should be following her @TheWorryGames as well, of course, as Beautiful Voyager @nervesbegone.)

Here's an interview that Lisa did with Like-Minded Magazine, an online interview magazine founded in Amsterdam. Three of my favorite quotes from her interview:

"You gotta have a sense of humor if you have anxiety. A lot of it really is ridiculous and its okay to acknowledge that and have a laugh every now and then."

"I have trained myself to be an optimistic pessimist."

"I never would have been motivated to change the way I was living w/o the extreme discomfort & fear anxiety gave me."

I had posted this on the The Beautiful Voyager Facebook page, and then realized that there are people who come here who never see that. So I wanted it to be here too. Lisa's good words deserve to be heard!

Khan Academy's take on Generalized Anxiety Disorder

If you have a 6 minutes to spare and you haven't run out of your data plan for the month yet (the way I have), take a look at the Khan Academy Generalized Anxiety video on your way to work in tomorrow's Lyft. The bad news is since you're already reading this, you already know that you or someone you love has GAD. You also already know, for the most part, everything you are going to see in the video.

This makes me wonder: Who is the video for, exactly?

• It's not for people who have GAD and are diagnosed. We don't talk about it the way that Matthew Twohig does, in that "list of worry behaviors" manner. We don't like to think about our worry too much cause it stresses us out.

• It's not for people who have GAD and are undiagnosed. They wouldn't recognize themselves in it. If I had seen it 6 months before I was diagnosed, I would have neatly pushed away a video like this. It doesn't speak to me for all of the reasons I laid out in my initial FAQ article.

This makes me think it's for people who don't have GAD. But who would be googling GAD that doesn't have GAD? It's an odd audience, isn't it? Is it some sort of casual bystanders of GAD?

This is the problem I have with 90% of the writing about GAD online.

It comes from medical professionals, but it's totally disconnected from the experience of GAD itself. It means well, but it just doesn't work. They can speak in a breezy tone, like they do in the Khan Academy video, but until they start to fundamentally change their appraoch, and think about who they are really speaking to, they are going to miss the mark.

My advice is to start from a blank sheet. Talk to your users. Interview us with an open mind. We are overthinkers who experience physical symptoms. We often avoid treatment or medication until we desperately need it. We try to figure everything out and we Google like crazy. We are achievers. Get to know us, medical professionals. See the world from our eyes, and start from there.

Talk to some product managers if you need some lessons in how to do this. I happen to know how to reach a few if you need help in figuring out where to start...