Getting Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable

For the first time since I graduated college, I feel like life is falling into place enough that I get to have a relatively normal summer. Most summers I prepare for my life to be completely uprooted and try to plan for whatever the following school year will bring without actually knowing where I'm going to land. This year I'm lucky; I don't yet know the full details of where I'll plant myself next year, but I know enough to feel calm and settled and motivated to tackle the tasks I need to in order to find my footing again. When I realized just how many uncertainties were taken off my plate, I got excited. I started planning for a mostly anxiety-free summer. Except I've realized it's not going to be anxiety-free - but not for the reasons you may think.

For the majority of time that I've seen therapists since my initial mental health diagnoses, our appointments have consisted of crisis management. It's been 8 years of major life stressors (or occasionally minor life stressors that Anxiety Brain blows up until I'm no longer being a functional human being). Outside of building coping skills that work in both times of major crisis and times of minor stress, I've never really progressed in battling Anxiety Brain. I've spent a lot of time getting pushed backward and trying to regain the ground I once had only to get pushed back again, sometimes landing me further behind than I was before. I haven't quite figured out how to move beyond where I was when I first realized that I had a problem. I haven't figured out how to start gaining new ground.

With most major life-stresses off my plate and very few plans for the summer, I decided that I wanted to take this time to start tackling some of my battles with Anxiety Brain head-on - and one battle in particular rose to the top of my priority list. Anxiety Brain likes to tell me that no one wants me around, and it knows that its biggest enemy is people demonstrating that they actually do want me in their lives. Anxiety Brain is also a crafty self-preservationist, so it targets particular people - those who are the most valuable to me, most supportive, most likely to help me grow as a person (or some combination of all three) - and turns those people into my biggest enemies. Anxiety Brain takes a single person or group of people and tells me that that person or group's opinion of me is the only one that matters. And then Anxiety Brain tells me that they don't like me, that they don't want me around, that they think I'm some horrible awkward person that's maybe allowed to exist but only if I'm off hiding in some dark hole where I can't bother anyone. Then, because that person or group is so valuable to me, I'm desperate to convince them that all the things Anxiety Brain says they think about me are wrong (whether they actually think those things or not). So when I do get to hang out with that person or group, I spend the whole time afraid to do anything beyond existing, afraid that I'll say or do something that will rain down their judgement upon me, afraid that if they don't already think all the things that Anxiety Brain says they do, I'll manage to change their minds so that they agree with Anxiety Brain by the end of our time together. It's why I spend the hours, days, and even weeks leading up to social plans feeling nauseous every time I think about it, half-considering backing out of the plans altogether. It's why I spend the hours, days, and even weeks afterward replaying conversations in my head, over-analyzing what was said and the non-verbals accompanying it, reinterpreting even the positive parts of conversation as negative. Doing this often gets so exhausting that I eventually retreat into isolation, occasionally daring to enter social situations but only when someone else reaches out first.

Until this Spring. Until out of nowhere I started finding insane moments of courage to fight back against Anxiety Brain. Until I decided to stop isolating myself and start letting people in. I've finally learned that not only do I need people in order to survive, but I really need people in order to thrive. When I look at life over the past year, my ability to effectively manage anxiety directly correlates with how connected I feel to people I've claimed as a part of my support system. So as I looked at a summer with no consistent social activity planned, I realized that in order to continue the positive projectile I've been on for the past few months, I needed to find ways to be around people.

But I was left with a dilemma. In order to spend time with people, you have to make plans, and to make plans you face two scenarios - to either extend an invite or to accept an invite extended by someone else. Each of these seems simple enough - but not when you have Anxiety Brain around to complicate things. You know those comic strips and cartoons that depict a character trying to make an important decision with an angel sitting on one shoulder and a devil sitting on the other, each arguing which option is better? Living with Anxiety Brain is kind of like that sometimes. Except they're both devils (because there's nothing angelic about Anxiety Brain). And they're competing with each other to make each option and its consequences sound more terrifying than the other. And they're less trying to get you to choose one way or the other but instead trying to make you feel paralyzed because both options sound horrifying and awful, and you wish you could somehow not have to be in charge of choosing either one. That's what my last few months have been like as I've tried to figure out the best way to make sure I spend as much or more time with other people than I do with just Anxiety Brain this summer. To extend invitations or not? To accept invitations or not? Anxiety Brain has had me spinning in circles for weeks.

To someone with Social Anxiety, extending an invite is clearly a terrifying experience. Even the informal "Hey, we should hang out sometime!" can trigger debilitating anxiety levels. Extending an invite risks rejection. Even a simple "No" is something that Anxiety Brain reinterprets to mean "You're horrible and awful and weird. Why would I, or anyone else, ever want to spend time with such a depressing waste of space? You're such an annoyance! Please just stay out of my life and never ask me to spend time with you again. Also, if you see me somewhere else, just stay away. Wow, I can't believe you actually thought it'd be a good idea for us to ever hang out together! " That's out of a simple "No." So now imagine what Anxiety Brain does when that "No" is elaborated on. Even the "I don't have time right now" or "I already have plans" get twisted into "I'm lying to spare your feelings, but let's never, ever hang out together, and please don't ever invite me to spend time with you again." Complete non-responses turn into "Who on earth do you think you are? Do you really think that you're actually good enough or liked enough to spend time with me? What are you, delusional or something? I'm just going to ignore you and hope that you go away." On the days that Anxiety Brain is feeling particularly cruel, it brings up all the times in the past that an invitation was met with rejection and the feelings of embarrassment and defeat that followed and then asks if its worth risking the possibility of repeating that experience. The unknown of how someone else will respond to an invitation is a limitless playground for Anxiety Brain to dream up every possible negative outcome. This means the simple act of sending a text saying "Hey, we should get together sometime!" is one that often takes me months to convince myself is worth the risk of sending.

You'd think, then, that receiving and accepting an invitation would be easier. It's not. Turns out that Anxiety Brain makes it just as intimidating. Because Anxiety Brain's first question is always "Are you sure they didn't invite you by mistake?" Anything from someone saying "Hey, we should hang out!" to sending an invite to an actual social gathering brings forth this question. What if it was a mistake? What if they meant to ask someone else? What if the whole purpose of the invite is because they want to sit down and tell you how awful you are? What if they accidentally included you in a group that they didn't intend to? What if the invite was sent out of obligation, and they didn't actually want you there? What if they regretted the invitation as soon as they extended it? Then, if by some miracle I make it past the questions of the invitation's legitimacy and genuineness, Anxiety Brain bombards me with all the things that could potentially go wrong if I actually show up. What if I wear the wrong thing and look out of place? What if I don't know what to say to keep the conversation going? Or what if I say all the wrong things? When I'm supposed to bring food/beverage to share, what if they don't like what I bring? When it's a gathering of multiple people, especially large numbers of people, what if I don't fit in? What if I get left out of the group? What if I'm left on the outside looking in - or, even worse, on the inside but feeling like an outsider?

Anxiety Brain's tactics have had me spinning in circles for months about all the woes of inviting people to do things and whether I should accept invitations once I've been invited to a social gathering. I've lost more sleep over this issue in the last few months than I have over this Spring's job search. And I'm sick of it.

Like I said before, I need good people around me not just to survive but to thrive. Plus I simply love being around people that I care about. Being an introvert may mean that I often get over-stimulated by large groups and loud spaces, but I still love being around people. My favorite hobby is to learn about people and their life stories; I collect and strive to remember every detail because people matter to me. I want to spend time with them. And I'm ready to be done listening to Anxiety Brain tell me not to. So this summer I made a choice. I decided to step out of my comfort zone in an attempt to achieve something I've wanted for a long time: more time spent with people in my life that I value.

Let me tell you, it has been hard. It's a good thing I decided long before summer started that I wanted to spend time being more social because it took months of drafts of messages and conversations to start reaching out to people. Initially I waited for an insane moment of bravery where I felt invincible enough to not care the consequences of reaching out to people, but that moment wasn't coming soon enough. In the time apart from consistent, positive social contact, Anxiety Brain was quickly taking over. Instead of an insane moment of bravery, it took sheer will-power to start contacting some people (though I'm still working on finding the bravery and/or sheer will-power to connect with others). Suddenly I had multiple days on the calendar with plans scheduled to hang out with people, and I have a number of other plans in progress. It turns out that I discovered a whole new set of Anxiety Brain battlefields along the way (brought on by the new experience of having 5 electronic conversations going on at once between Facebook and texting), but I forged ahead anyway. Beyond extending invitations myself, I also (so far) have yet to turn down an invitation to spend time with friends, though accepting invitations has taken just as much extreme fortitude to do as it did to extend invitations. Through it all, I've fought through most of the anxiety, and I've generally been pretty proud of myself. I've also been exhausted. Anxiety Brain takes a lot of hard work and energy to fight, and it's just as unnerving as major life stress - so I'm exhausted. But I also know that choosing to attack this particular battle head-on will, at least theoretically, be good for me in the long run.

You see, after I'd already made my big plan to work beyond my anxiety comfort zone this summer, I shared it with my therapist. She pulled out a picture of the "Window of Tolerance" - a graph split into three sections with a line representing a person's stress. The goal is to stay in the middle section - too high and you go into fight-or-flight mode, too low and you go into freeze mode, either way you can't effectively deal with the stress that you're feeling. We talked about how I live most of life at the top of the graph in fight-or-flight mode. With decreased life stressors for now, I'm mostly in the middle section - but my middle section is a lot narrower than the average person's. The good news is that when you're not spending all your time outside of that middle section, that "Window of Tolerance," you can work to stretch it to be bigger. Choosing to push yourself just past your threshold eventually retrains your brain to believe that you'll make it through that stress, and it becomes part of your Window of Tolerance, and that window grows.

I had already known that I wanted to fight Anxiety Brain this summer in order to better expand and strengthen my growing support system. I knew that I wanted to find the courage and tools and coping skills to deal with the anxiety-triggering scenarios that have often divided me from my support system in the past. But until that appointment, I had never consciously considered that putting in the hard work might mean that the power of those anxiety triggers diminish, that they could be everyday, manageable life stressors instead of energy-sucking, paralyzing ones.

So this summer I'm taking advantage of this time with fewer life stressors, and I'm forcing myself to get a little more comfortable with being uncomfortable. It's terrifying and challenging and draining. Anxiety triggers don't change overnight - but if gradual, repeated exposure means that coping with them becomes easier, I'm all in. So I'm trying. I'm trying to spend time with more people - whether that means extending an invitation or accepting one from someone else. I'm trying to remain open in writing about my anxiety struggles - the big and the small, the understandable and seemingly insane - even though I've hit a point where every time I finish writing any sort of post I'm ready to run screaming in the opposite direction as far away as possible to find a cave where I can barricade myself in and cease to let people see all the less-perfect sides of me. I'm trying to have real conversations with people, ones where I'm willing to admit all my flaws and failures, anxiety-related or not. I'm trying to not only accept but invite constructive criticism, to allow people to share their opinions and advice with me without letting myself feel like a failure for being less than perfect and without assuming that my inability to have previously followed their advice (or my inability to follow it in the future) dooms the future of our friendship. I'm trying to grow.

All these things I'm trying to do are anything but comfortable. Some moments or even full days the mere idea of willingly facing all these anxiety triggers makes me want to curl up in a ball on the couch, snuggle with my dog, and spend the rest of the summer bingeing the long list of shows I want to watch and re-watch on Netflix. And some days (like last Monday), when I need a break from the toil of growing, that's exactly what I'll do. But most days I'm going to keep trying. Keep pushing myself. Keep building my ability to tolerate those anxiety triggers. Keep taking deep breaths and telling myself that even though I'm intentionally putting myself in uncomfortable situations, I'm going to be okay. I'm going to keep working toward the skills I need to be a healthy, functional human being and not a falling-apart, dysfunctional mess.

As I strive to get comfortable with being uncomfortable, the conversation I had with my roommate one morning earlier this week comes to mind. We've been friends for 19 years now, and she's been one of my closest friends through all that time - but I've only in the past few months started actually sharing what it means when I say that I'm having a "rough anxiety day." In recent weeks, our conversations have evolved into me saying "Hey, want to know the stupid thing Anxiety Brain has been telling me today?" and her listening and providing sometimes repetitive feedback as I circle through the same conversation with Anxiety Brain over and over again. It's been both freeing and petrifying all at once - but it's made a difference. And this particular conversation stands out.

Me: I don't know if I should go to that social event next weekend.
Roommate: You should definitely go.
Me: But I'm pretty sure the invite was a mistake.
Roommate: It wasn't a mistake.
Me: But what if it was a mistake, and then I show up, and then it's awkward?
Roommate: It wasn't a mistake. They invited you because they want you there. You should go, and you'll be fine.
Me: But what if it's still a bad idea for me to go?
Roommate: Am I going to have to kick your butt out the door to go to the social event that day?
Me: Quite possibly. (Pauses) What if the invite was a mistake, and then it's awkward, and then the person who invited me wants to cancel the plans we have later this summer.
Roommate: They're not going to cancel the other plans you two have. And you should go to the event.
Me: But what if it's awkward?
Roommate: It won't be awkward, and you should go. Is that what Anxiety Brain needs to hear?
Me: Yeah... Or you're welcome to share your actual opinion, too.
Roommate: You should go, but it might be awkward.
Me: Okay. (Takes deep breath because that's not necessarily what I wanted to hear, but I'm trying to appreciate the honesty, which I asked for, as Anxiety Brain starts telling me all the ways it could possibly awkward). But what if it's not okay that it's awkward?
Roommate: It will be fine. That type of social event is pretty much always a little bit awkward, but you'll be fine, and you should go.
Me: (Thinks for a moment) You know, the last two times I went to that type of social event, neither of which involved the extra circumstances that are freaking me out about this one, it was a little awkward. But it was okay. (Internally: That means if I go and it's awkward, it's probably the type of event making it awkward, not me making it awkward).

In that moment, I realized how often in life we as humans have to force ourselves to face the uncomfortable. From the awkwardness that accompanies certain types of social events to the awkwardness which we experience when trying something new. It wasn't just an Anxiety Brain thing - it was a normal person thing. I could work to accept the likely awkwardness; I could let myself get comfortable with the idea that the event might be uncomfortable.

What makes this conversation even better? Three months ago, the conversation wouldn't have happened. Three days beforehand, I probably wouldn't have asked her to share what she really thought. I felt ridiculous as I spewed every single question that Anxiety Brain was throttling at me that day, most of which she had heard before, most of which she will probably hear again before I hopefully convince myself that I should attend the event. But I was working to get comfortable with the uncomfortable. And in doing so I not only made some anxiety triggers a little less triggering, but I grew a little bit as a person - and that was the whole point to begin with. To face my fears of interacting with people so that they can be there to support me and to help me grow. I got a little more comfortable with feeling uncomfortable and because of that my world changed just a little bit - and I can't wait for it to change like that again.