Why “Nice” Advice Used to Stress Me Out

And how I fixed it.

When you have an anxiety disorder, you’re used to navigating the world of “life advice” like football players doing the block and tackle. New perspectives are coming at you from all directions, and it’s your job to quarterback yourself through the experience intact. It’s not always easy, though.

In the past few years, I’ve learned that even well-intentioned, “nice” advice needs reframing in order to avoid leaving a mark. It’s just part of having anxiety.

Through my past few years of job changes, there’s been one piece of advice that’s come up more than others. I’ve heard it again and again. It’s: “Embrace Who You Are.” Though it’s definitely a nice sentiment, since I have anxiety, being told to embrace my true self has made me feel:

Here’s Why.

Anxiety made it very hard to know what, exactly, what I should be embracing. Anxiety obscured who I was and what I liked. All I could hear was pressure and static inside my head. Well-intentioned advice like “Embrace Who You Are” added pressure to an already-tight space.

I Tried This Instead.

When someone gives me the “embrace who you are” advice, I’ve learned to reframe it into:

Seek the space to allow your inner voice to speak up.

This was my daughter at the beach last week. She pondered sand for 20 minutes.

Instead of piling another difficult to-do onto the list, I’ve used this reframe to remove them, giving myself room to let the answers start to bubble up themselves.

For those of us with anxiety, the best advice is never about trying harder to do anything. I’ll sound like Yoda here, but the advice that works all enters on this theme: Create the space, and the insight will come.

This is how I learned to reframe “nice” advice so that it works for me. I hope it works for you, too!

My answer to "Can you recommend a therapist to help with my anxiety?"

Last weekend, I got the following text from a friend of mine. She had recently moved in with her boyfriend of a year and she needed advice:

"[Boyfriend} I talked about his anxiety. We both think it’s time for him to start talking to someone. Any suggestions on a therapist? Need advice."

What a challenge!

Though I’m honored when people reach out in a pivotal moment, I feel extremely ambivalent about recommending therapists. It's so easy to find the wrong one. (As I've written about before, I went to numerous therapists who never diagnosed me with anxiety.) It's not that I'm against therapy. It's just that I think it's only one part of the equation.

So before I continuing down the therapy route, I started with this question to get her thinking:

"Does {Boyfriend} have neck or back pain? Is he weird about schedules and a little Type A?"

She said, "Not sure. Yes. Yes. How did you know?"

I told her that his symptoms sounded very familiar. I suspected he was a fellow member of the overthinking tribe.

I told my friend: "Getting to know the self you’ve been pushing away is an uncomfortable, messy process. If seeing a therapist feels like it can help with clarity, your boyfriend should do it. But therapy is one of many changes that will probably need to happen, and it might not even be the most important one." I told her that he should focus on finding a cognitive behavioral therapist who, sadly, tend to be even more expensive than regular therapists. 

Then I shared this reading list with my friend, as well as an in-depth interview from Like-Minded Magazine that described my early path to anxiety awareness to help spark her thinking. I told her that she and her boyfriend were embarking on a new journey together that would take many forms. Medication, meditation, and communication were the treatments I found that worked best for me right now. Here was my list of action items:

• explore meditation immediately
• begin reading the book on the list that appealed to him
• experiment with trying to describe what he was feeling in simple sentences to her. Anxiety makes us even worse at it than humans normally are.
• research cognitive behavioral therapy and see what he thought
• accept the following, because it's true:

"Finally, I want to share the good part of this news," I said to my friend. "By realizing something’s wrong — by knowing there’s a disconnect — your guy is already partway there."

"And he’s very lucky to have you at his side."

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