Anxiety: What if it’s not a bad thing?

Anxiety is a strange thing and people tend to have a complicated relationship with it.

But it can give you everything you need to get up there, focus, and perform.

I was the last presenter at a two-day conference for the Wisconsin Defense Counsel last week. Of course the topic was on wellness, specifically the prevalence of anxiety in the legal profession and strategies for leveraging it to one’s advantage. The other sessions were on substantive subjects relating to insurance litigation, but there I was, primed to close out the event with a talk about feelings. The irony of the anxiety that crept in as I thought about that was not lost on me. I knew my material inside and out, there were some familiar faces in the audience, and I knew that the subject matter was important. But I still felt doubt. A trickle of fear had me wondering why I continue to choose to roll the dice and potentially make a fool of myself. It also gave me everything I needed to stand up there, focus, and perform. And you know what, it ultimately went really well.

Anxiety is a strange thing and people tend to have a complicated relationship with it. When we experience anxiety, we immediately wish it away. But that’s the point. We experience anxiety because we detected a problem or threat and that anxiety tends to stick around until we do something about it. We can make that anxiety go away by fixing the problem. And we want that to happen as quickly as possible.

But as we know, resolving anxiety is rarely clear or simple. We’re not dealing with bears and tigers stalking us down in the wild. Instead, we’re dealing with threats to our esteem, pride, reputation, and relationships. Sometimes it’s our jobs, careers, and futures. Or our values, expectations, and way of life. So many things stand to cause us ambiguous, intangible harm one way or another and they all demand our attention. And they give us anxiety to motivate us to try and figure out how to get ahead of them.

However, sometimes that ambiguous threat of harm comes from within and works to our disadvantage. I was emotionally neutral when I first arrived in that conference room. Up to that point, I was focused on getting to the venue, locating the room, and situating myself. After I checked all my task boxes and settled into the new task of waiting for my turn to speak, my brain decided to conjure up something to worry about. It created anxiety out of thin air.

As I mentioned earlier, that anxiety ultimately helped me show up with my best effort. But a problem lies in those anxious thoughts that ran counter to my interest in performing well. Specifically, the thoughts of wanting to escape that came along with my thoughts about screwing up. Those latter thoughts were to my advantage—they motivated me to anticipate potential problems and better my odds of success, but the former made me want to flee.

After a few minutes of ruminating, I looked around the room. The conference was the American Club in Kohler, one of the most beautiful venues in the state. Our room was gorgeously finished in a darkly stained hardwood sprawling across the walls and ceilings, complete with rich lighting from ornate pendants. The tables were draped in crisp bright white linen, every seat had a glass, and every two seats had a topped pitcher of ice water. The seats were comfortable and the sound system was clear and at an appropriate volume. Everything was neat, orderly, and professional.

I focused on the sheer privilege it was to be there. To have a platform to convey an important message to an interested, captive audience. To have successfully pursued a career doing the very thing that I was about to do. All of my experience as a person, a lawyer, a therapist—all of it was about to be leveraged in full for fifty solid minutes doing something I frankly love to do. How lucky I was to have been afforded this opportunity.

I filled my head with this. Soaked my brain with mindfully experienced gratitude, absorbing the place, the time, and the experience. I flooded my awareness with all the things about the moment, and my emotions responded in kind. I started to feel good and my anxiety tapered off enough for me to get up to the podium and experience the next fifty minutes. Soon there was laughter. Volunteers. Contemplative silences. You know your engagement’s good when laptops illuminate fewer faces as your talk goes on. (Yes, we can see the reflection of Outlook in your glasses from the podium. It’s really a win for us when your screen goes to sleep.)

Controlled anxiety is a crucial asset. It’s a large part of how we still exist and why we continue to achieve. Yes it’s something that happens to us but we’re not merely passengers along for the ride. There are things we can do about it, and we can and should leverage it to our advantage.