Please Meet My Anxiety
There I was. In a cramped office in the West Wing of the White House for a meeting. It was hot. And crowded. As soon as someone closed the door, I knew it would happen. I felt the twist in my stomach. The prickly heat all over my body. I started sweating. My brain went into overdrive to try to shut down the thoughts and the flood of stress hormones. But I knew, “If I don’t get out of this room, I’m going to pass out. In front of all of these people. Then I’ll make a scene and interrupt everything. And what will they think of me?”
My anxiety - grown since birth - could get so overwhelming that my brain literally took me down. I would pass out. It was my brain doing a hard reset. You know the phrase fight, flight, freeze or faint? Well, that’s exactly what my anxiety would tell my body to do. Faint. Not a particularly convenient response.
I’ve passed out everywhere. Singing in a church choir performance when I was nine. On my wedding day. On Capitol Hill. At holiday dinners. At other people’s weddings. In unfamiliar locations. And, in the West Wing of the White House.
That day, I excused myself and made it to a nearby bathroom. Sometimes, lying on the floor would help. Actually, if I’m honest, I would lie on the floor, black out for a few seconds and then wake up. Weirdly when I woke up, I always felt supremely calm (albeit clammy from the sweat) and could get up and go on with my day. Like I said, hard reset.
But in that moment, before I could lie down, I passed out, fell forward, hit my face on a water fountain and almost broke my nose. Not ideal. Being the perfectionist who could do it all, I picked myself up, cleaned myself up the best I could and went back into the meeting.
I know. It seems insane. And it was my reality for decades.
But it isn’t my reality anymore.
I did Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for a little while and was on anti-anxiety medication. That was important and helped me learn to redirect my brain and create new exit ramps on my super highway of anxious thoughts. But my anxiety was always still there, running in the background, circulating through my body like my blood.
And then my coach, Natalie Miller, offered a 6-week course on perfectionism called Beyond Perfect. As I sat on a bolster in her yoga studio and listened to the content, I felt like throwing up. Because it was so familiar. As part of the class we read Brené Brown’s The Gifts of Imperfection, and it quickly became clear that I would need to dig deep and get comfortable with some very hard truths about how my own thinking directly led to my perfectionism, which led to my anxiety.
Perfectionism is something that’s often conditioned in childhood. Mine certainly was. As the only daughter in my family, there were a lot of expectations about how to look, how to set the table, how to behave, how to make others comfortable and most definitely how to worry about, “what others would think”.
I was also the kid who colored outside the lines at school and was often told by teachers things like, “Why can’t you color neatly like Becky?” Fun fact, Becky is now an architect. OF COURSE she colored neatly as a child. I am a creative big thinker. OF COURSE I colored outside the lines.
Brené Brown says, “You can’t ever do anything brave, if you’re wearing the straitjacket of ‘What will people think?’” Perfectionism is a straitjacket. And by the second week of Natalie’s class, I was ready to find my way free.
That’s when it got really hard, because freedom meant confronting my worst fears about “what would people think?” And unwinding and challenging decades of my own thoughts and beliefs. Here are a few of the ways I began taking off the straightjacket:
Daily journaling about the qualities I wanted in my life (hint: not anxiety!)
Practicing self-compassion. Talking kindly to myself and being mindful about my inner dialogue remains to this day one of the most impactful things I do. It changed the way I think, the way I parent, and the way I interact with other people.
Redefining myself as enough instead of lacking in any way. That one was particularly hard.
Practicing gratitude. I know people can talk about this in kind of trite ways, but it really does work. I start and end my day with a gratitude practice.
Thought work. So much thought work. By thought work, I mean working with a coach to find the thoughts behind my perfectionism (such as, “you’ll never be enough”), turning those thoughts around and dissecting them until they don’t hook me anymore. Byron Katie’s The Work and Brooke Castillo’s Self-Coaching Model* are what I use most, but doing it with a coach is the most helpful. I probably worked 50 separate thoughts - maybe more - around perfectionism.
It took a lot longer than the six week course - truthfully, I am still working on it. But one day I realized that I hadn’t passed out in months. And then it became years. And now my anxiety level is so low that I could not raise it high enough to pass out if I tried.
Guess what’s taken anxiety’s place? Freedom. Bravery to speak my mind without caring what others might think. A deep knowing that what I put out into the world is good for the world, even when it’s not perfect. If I live from my heart, I shine like Captain Marvel when she turns into gold. And wow does that feel better than anxiety.
XO,
Patty
*I know, I talk about The Work and the Self-Coaching Model ALL THE TIME. Why? Because they are crazy powerful. Happy to coach you through them. Email me to get in touch, set up some time to chat or PM me @pattyfirstcoaching on Instagram.