Anxiety and Coping
You know what I’m coping with, right? I’m not going to say it. My main coping mechanism is trying not to let it take up too much space in my brain.
Hi friends,
It has been a long time. I started writing a newsletter many months ago and then couldn’t get it exactly perfect, let that be the enemy of the good, threw a temper tantrum about it, and never logged in here again. I am a mature grown up. Anyway, now I’m emailing you about coping.
You know what I’m coping with, right? I’m not going to say it. My main coping mechanism is trying not to let it take up too much space in my brain.
Let me get a little more specific with that. I have Anxiety, capital A. It got pretty bad a few times in years past, I went to therapy about it, and eventually developed some pretty decent coping mechanisms. The driver of my anxiety is the feeling that I somehow ought to be able to fix everything that goes wrong for everyone I care about, forever. As you can imagine, that is literally impossible. Yet even knowing that, when I can’t manage it, my brain ends up sounding like a fork caught in the garbage disposal: endless horrible grinding that feels bad and does nothing useful.
(Chidi, I feel you. What a good show. What we’re currently living through? This is the Bad Place.)
When my brain is grinding like that, one of the things it craves is information. It wants to plan. It’s the feeling that maybe if I learn everything about whatever bad thing is happening, I’ll figure out how I, personally, all by myself, can fix it. And okay, so I can’t actually solve everything myself, but surely, surely, consuming every single bit of information I possibly can will help somehow, right? Right???
Uhhh… yeah. Fork in a garbage disposal. Consuming every bit of information feels like action, but it isn’t, because it turns out I can’t actually solve everything all by myself. What consuming all that information actually does is consume me, turning my brain into a spiral of all the horrible things that could happen, and then throw a lot of guilt at me if I try to try to do literally anything else.
Or, in the modern vernacular: I doomscroll.
The thing is, not only is doomscrolling not helpful, it’s also actively paralyzing. Anxiety is exhausting, and spiraling eats up energy that could go to actually doing something useful.
All of which brings me back around to coping mechanisms. Here are some things I tried. They may be helpful for you; they might not. Please take what feels useful and ignore the rest, and please take care of yourself.
Social media: I took all of this off my phone, immediately. Goodbye, Bluesky; so long, Instagram. I shut down discord. I also closed the tabs that I have things open in on my laptop. I deleted all the emails with panicked subject lines without opening any of them.
This was good for stopping me from doomscrolling, though the side effect was that I felt kind of isolated. The internet is where all my friends live! But I texted a lot of friends, and hey, now I’m writing to you all.
Over the last couple of days I’ve slowly let myself back online. Instagram stays off my phone, discord is no longer on the first screen so I have to work to open it, and I keep it muted. Bluesky shows me only a small feed of people I know IRL and who aren’t likely to talk about the things I’m avoiding.
Honestly? It’s not bad. I don’t think of myself as a huge social media person… but I am always, always on my computer so yeah, rewiring some of those habits so they’re less all consuming is probably a good thing, regardless.
The news: I don’t check it. (With caveats I’ll get to in a second.) The thing is, as I said before, my brain doesn’t process information by saying “okay, good to know what’s going on,” and letting me move on. It finds something, it gloms on, and then all I can think about is the bad things and all the bad things that might happen, and then I am tired and sad and unable to do anything.
So I don’t look at news sites. I don’t open headlines emails. I certainly don’t look at socials for updates (see previous).
Instead, I’m subscribed to Letters From an American. Heather Cox Richardson provides a news update nearly every day, always calmly, usually with a lot of historical context. It isn’t always optimistic or uplifting (how could it be?) but it also isn’t doom and gloom. It just is. The historical context helps a lot. It’s a great way to stay up to date without panicking about it. I read it, I take a few deep breaths, and I try to move on with my day.
I also periodically check in on Celeste Pewter. While she provides less general news, she does give out actionable steps to help. If you’re in a place where you can make a few phone calls, she provides scripts explaining what you can ask your reps to do. Taking action feels better than doing nothing. I may not be able to save the entire world by myself, but I can sometimes do small things that help. That’s way better than doomscrolling.
Exercise: I’m not going to pretend I do this one much. I don’t. But what I do know is that a few days back I nearly had a panic attack and I absolutely could not shake the anxiety. It happened around lunchtime, and by the end of the work day I was still feeling it in a very real, physical way. I wasn’t feeling up to doing anything, I certainly wasn’t going to drag myself all the way to the pool for a swim, and I didn’t want to do that anyway because swimming is a great time for dwelling, so instead I went to my co-op’s little gym — literally next door! — and walked very slowly on a treadmill for an hour while I watched a silly Youtube video recapping a teen drama I don’t even watch.
The physical activity settled my body down. This is something I picked up from reading Burnout a few years back. Even something like a slow walk can help your body process stress, and that combined with occupying my brain so I couldn’t dwell actually made me feel much, much better.
Distraction: Finally, the biggie. I said before I have a lot of guilt when I try distraction over doomscrolling… but distraction is better. Because again: all doomscrolling does is exacerbate the anxiety without fixing anything, and eat up energy which at some point you could use for actions that actually help. But not if you’re too exhausted and paralyzed to do it.
With me doing so much less engaging online, I also have a lot more free time, so I’ve been trying to read a bit (mixed results; reading while anxious doesn’t always go great). I’ve still been working on my manuscript (big revision almost done). And uh. I might have spent way too much money on a new TV and a Playstation 5, but I was going to buy those eventually anyway and the PS5 is actually refurbished, and look, we all do what we’ve gotta, okay? Buying things is not an answer to world crises, but on the other hand, finally getting to play the gay DLC for Horizon Forbidden West doesn’t hurt anything, either.
I think that’s it for now. In the future, there will be a lot of work to do, and that will be part of coping, too. What little I let myself look at online has a lot of people talking about community and coalitions, about action and activism. Those are good and important, and like I said above, taking action is better than giving in to the anxiety.
I’ll be there, and I’ll do what I can. I probably can’t save the whole world, no matter what my brain wants me to believe. But I’m sure as heck going to try, and I need to protect my brain in the meantime. I hope you can find a way to do the same.
-Becky
PS: I also recommend having adorable cats who will purr and snuggle you as a coping mechanism. Or… at least cats who will tolerate your nonsense.
