When Anxiety is a Call to Action

During the pandemic, my client Dexter spent most of his time isolating in an apartment with his mother, smoking weed, and getting progressively more anxious about everything he wasn’t accomplishing.

He felt like his life was on pause. As a musician, there was nowhere for him to perform—and performing was what he needed to do to improve his craft.

When clubs and stages started to open up again, he still felt anxious, but he was able to book a few gigs. Most of the places he performed even asked him back. Little by little, Dexter was reclaiming his life as a musician. But he felt more anxious than ever. 

“I didn’t do anything during COVID,” he told me. “And now I’m always thinking about how I’m not prepared enough when I show up for these gigs.”

A bell went off in my head. “Are you actually not prepared?” I asked him. 

In other words, was his mind giving him a hard time even though he was doing the best he could? Or was he not executing a practice schedule that would make him feel prepared?

He thought about it for a moment. Then a look of shame came onto his face. “I’m not practicing enough to feel prepared,” he said.  

“And that’s totally okay,” I said. “In fact, it’s good!”

“It is?” 

Dexter didn’t realize it yet, but the anxiety he was experiencing wasn't only about feeling nervous and overwhelmed. In this case, it was clear that anxiety was also a call to action. 

Anxiety isn’t always the bad guy

Though we tend to think of anxiety as a negative emotion, it isn’t always the bad guy. Dexter’s is just one example of anxiety emerging as a signal that we need to make a change in our lives.  

Sometimes anxiety can show up in the context of our relationships, too. One of my clients—let’s call her René—recently came to a session with a lot of anxious thoughts about the state of her friendships.

When we got to the point where she could let in the anxiety without judging it, I asked her what she needed to feel better about her friendships. 

More specifically, instead of looking for evidence about whether or not she was a good friend, I asked her to think about ways she could be a better friend.

Could she text her friends and tell them what she loved about them? Make notes about when big events were happening in their lives and check in with them on those days? Make sure their conversations were a balance of listening and sharing? 

Like Dexter, René was experiencing anxiety as a call to action. 

How do we know when anxiety is a call to action?

How can you tell the difference between anxiety that’s calling for self-compassion and anxiety that’s calling you into action? 

Whenever I’m working with a client who’s struggling with this question, I like to guide them through these three emotional stages:

1.   Accept the anxiety without judgment

2.   Reality check your situation

3.   Ask yourself what you need 

Let’s go back to the example with Dexter. Before he could act on the anxiety he was experiencing, he needed to give himself permission to feel it.

Why? Anxiety backfires when you deny or judge it. When you tell yourself there’s no reason to feel anxious, or that you should just ‘get over it,’ anxiety tends to fester until you’re frozen with fear and can’t make progress. 

On the other hand, when you name the anxiety, and tell yourself it’s okay to be feeling it, you start to release some of its power over you. 

This was what happened with Dexter: once he could allow himself to feel the anxiety, he was in a position to see his situation more clearly. 

“Let’s reality check this,” I said. “First of all, let’s look at where you started from. You went from ‘doing nothing’ during COVID to getting hired—and rehired!—to do gigs.” 

In other words, we looked for all the things that were going right in his life to make a true evaluation of his situation. (You can also do a reality check of your situation on your own. If this is hard for you, think about enlisting help from someone you trust to be compassionate and reassuring.)

Once Dexter could acknowledge the anxiety he was feeling and get a broader perspective on his situation, the next step was to ask himself what he needed to do to feel better. 

For him, the answer was clear: in order to feel more confident going into his gigs, he needed to put in the effort to practice. And that’s exactly what he did: as the weeks went by, Dexter made time every day to practice his guitar, reconnecting with his love for music in the process. 

The anxiety he felt before his gigs didn’t disappear. But over time, he learned to see the anxiety for what it was—and use it to his benefit. 

By noting his anxious feelings instead of pushing them away, and by exploring what those feelings were trying to tell him, he was able to transform the anxiety into a call to action. 

Do you want to learn more about how to deal with big emotions like anxiety? In my book, Life Launch, I write about clear, easy-to-apply strategies for coping with anxiety. Download a sample chapter here. Bonus: Watch my TEDx talk on anxiety here.