Changing Your Relationship with Anxiety with ACT

Whether you’ve struggled with lifelong feelings of anxiousness or noticed it’s harder to cope with overwhelming thoughts lately, anxiety can feel like a riptide in our lives that is pulling us under. So, what do we do? Naturally, we see this riptide, or anxiety, as a problem that needs to be solved. We try doggy paddling to the surface while gasping for air in between yelps for help only to find that we are choking and quickly tiring out. In real life, our battle with anxiety may look like burying ourselves in work, avoiding the people and things we love most, or turning to alcohol or substances to avoid distressing thoughts and feelings. So how exactly do we save ourselves from this anxiety riptide? The answer lies in changing our relationship to our anxiety,  and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, or ACT (pronounced ‘act’), can help us with this. 

As distressing as it can be, anxiety is an emotion just like happiness, sadness, confusion, and anger. However, designs of the human central nervous system, language, and social norms have reinforced the idea that we need to always feel good and if we don’t, this is a problem that needs to be fixed. ACT acknowledges that the more we try to solve, distract, avoid, or numb our anxiety (in the hopes to feel good again), we inevitably feel worse. We may notice that we not only feel more anxious, but angry, frustrated, or depressed as well, because we couldn’t resolve our initial anxiousness. 

When we take the first step to changing our relationship with anxiety, we first acknowledge that anxiety is a naturally occurring feeling that we cannot get rid of. In fact, when we start changing our relationship to anxiety using ACT, we quickly notice that it comes and goes on its own just like any other feeling we experience (and research shows that we can experience at least three to four different emotions in a single day). We also realize that we can live more in the present moment and create a life worth living based on our values, even when distressing thoughts or feelings arise. Ultimately in ACT, the goal is not to get rid of anxiety, it is to change our relationship to it.

ACT’s six pillars address how to have a healthier relationship with our anxiety and cultivate a life worth living (even amid an anxiety riptide). These pillars include: 

Being Present: Mindfulness; focusing on the here and now without judgment

Self as Context: Viewing thoughts as thoughts and feelings as feelings and not true reflections of who we are

Defusion: Learning how to notice thoughts without becoming too attached to them

Values: Reconnecting to what is most important to us

Commitment: Pursuing the things that are most important to us in life, even during difficult situations 

Acceptance: Willingness to let difficult thoughts and feelings enter the mind without trying to solve them

So how do we stay alive in the anxiety riptide according to ACT? John Cena’s character, Ron, said it best in the film Vacation Friends. “I watched so many guys wear themselves out, swimming against the riptide, swimming as hard as they could. They had to be extracted. Me? I found out the trick was... just float.”