4 Ways to Use Language and Imagery to Help Manage Anxiety

As we enter new seasons, with an ongoing pandemic, we may find ourselves feeling more anxious than usual. With that thought in mind, I found myself compelled to write a paper on the nature of anxiety and ways to manage it.

Anxiety is a universal emotional and physical response to danger, stress, uncertainty or change. Anxiety serves a valuable purpose. It tells us to pay attention, be prepared, use precautions and look out for ourselves. It is a potentially life-preserving force. Even those out there with the most steady, calm temperaments have the potential to experience anxiety from time to time when faced with a particularly daunting or scary situation.

I remember learning about the difference between state and trait anxiety when I was in graduate school, pursuing my masters in counseling psychology. State anxiety refers to the feeling of tense, fearful hyper-arousal that occurs during a stressful or potentially threatening situation.

Trait anxiety, on the other hand, is the degree to which an individual is likely to experience anxiety in any given situation. While some people experience anxiety fairly infrequently, others are hard-wired to respond anxiously often and in many situations. We might say that people with a higher trait anxiety have anxious predispositions, or are more susceptible to anxiety, the way some people are more susceptible to developing strep throat or ear infections.

I have an anxious predisposition and have struggled with chronic anxiety for much of my life, and as a counselor, I have treated people with anxiety disorders. I have spent a great deal of time reading, writing, thinking and talking about anxiety, and a great deal of time experiencing and observing anxiety. One thing that has helped me on both a personal and professional level, is the use of imagery and language to find ways of describing, envisioning and managing anxiety. In the following section, I will illustrate four examples.

1. Getting to Know your Anxiety

Not necessarily as you would get to know a friend or loved one, but as you would get to know an opponent — like a chess opponent or a political opponent. Once you get to know your opponent’s strategies and signature moves, you can better prepare yourself to put up a good fight and possibly even win or end up ahead. Similarly, when we get to know our own brand of anxiety, we can develop tools and strategies for handling it. We can begin to see that even though the symptoms of anxiety and the situations that cause us to feel anxious might indeed be unpleasant, scary and overwhelming, we can get through it.

2. Taking a Step Back from Anxiety 

Not an actual, physical step back, but a mental step back. It involves recognizing when the anxiety response has been triggered, and being able to keep even just a small part of our awareness and/or consciousness separate from the experience. Once we do this, we have the capacity to talk ourselves through it, to remind ourselves that it will pass and to choose how we want to respond or which tool/strategy might help us.

3. The Two-Sided Scale

It might be helpful to envision a two-sided scale, with you standing on one side of it, and anxiety on the other side. First, this image reminds us that although we might have anxiety, anxiety does not define us. Regardless of how often anxiety comes to visit, we are still our own person. Additionally, this image can help us to gauge where we are with our anxiety on any given day or in any given moment. Once we assess the degree of anxiety, we can adjust our behavior and expectations accordingly.

4. Layers of Suffering 

Often, with chronic anxiety, comes feelings of guilt, shame and self-derision. It is not uncommon to hear people with anxiety say things like, “I feel like a burden/annoyance to others.”

“I feel weak or like I’m a coward.”

“I’ve tried everything and I’m still anxious. I must be doing something wrong.”

I’ve come to see these kinds of thoughts and feelings as being extra layers of suffering that we put on ourselves, the way a person might put on a hooded sweatshirt before going outside during a heat wave. It is normal to feel frustrated and discouraged at times when dealing with a chronic condition like anxiety. But, if we can learn to be gentle and compassionate with ourselves, we are ultimately more likely to make progress little by little than if we weigh ourselves down with extra layers of pain and suffering.

Although this article is about anxiety, many of the ideas are applicable to other chronic mental and physical conditions as well, such as depression, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), lupus, fibromyalgia and rheumatoid arthritis. I encourage anyone out there who is struggling to use the images and analogies that I’ve provided, or to find your own way of using language and imagery as a tool for managing symptoms and relapses.

And for those readers who do not struggle with a specific condition, other than the human condition, and the condition of living on this planet and in this country during a scary and volatile time — these ideas may be helpful to you too as you strive to maintain a sense of balance, perspective, purpose and meaning.

This story was originally published on the NAMI blog