Reframe your anxiety and embrace it as your superpower
Unlocking this potent mix of forethought, strategy, and emotional intelligence is all about how you harness your anxiety and use it to your advantage. Here’s how!
When you walk into a crowded room …
Or step in front of an audience …
Or get on the bus at rush hour …
… do you feel nervous?
Does that nervousness follow you home, ballooning into a state of dread and stress that makes you feel like you’re dying?
Scroll through your contacts on your phone — how many people do you think are currently mad at you? If you said, “All of them 🥲” then the same, dude. Same.
Do you ever partake in a solo cringefest after perfectly pleasant and normal social interactions? As if everything you have ever said is the most embarrassing, inauthentic thing anyone has ever said? Because me too!
Anxiety is a pretty common mental health diagnosis that around 30% of all adults will experience at one time or another in their lives.
Not only that, but women are more likely to be diagnosed than men. So, my fellow anxious girlies, this one’s for you!
Anxiety is secretly your superpower.
You read that right: your superpower. I’m here to help you reframe your outlook by showing you how anxiety can be a really helpful thing. How all your panicking, freaking out, biting your nails, tossing, and turning can actually be redirected into something truly powerful.
No, I don’t always think about my anxiety that way. And yes, I still have the occasional panic about this thing or that person.
I still get nervous before I go to the knitting club.
I still have days where I just cannot bear to be perceived by anyone, including myself.
But I have found something key here: reframing your anxiety and channeling it into something versatile and powerful can significantly change the game.
Anxiety keeps us alert and prepared.
“Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever is coming.” ― Robert Tew
Anxious folks already know every single way any given situation can turn out. We’ve spent the last few hours, days, and weeks neurotically brainstorming every eventuality, even the ones that would only plausibly happen in another universe.
The first way we can use anxiety as our superpower is by getting prepared for hard situations well ahead of time.
Because anxiety can heighten your awareness of potential threats or dangers. Anxiety is the thing that keeps coming back after The Bad Thing (you know, the one).
Your brain creates a sense of apprehension or outright panic so that you know you never want to experience that again.
It keeps us vigilant. And that vigilance doesn’t always match up to the situation, but oh boy, when it does — the anxious beans should take center stage. We were ready for it before anyone else.
And this kind of stress, the kind that ultimately elicits a positive response, is called eustress. Eustress is commonly called “good stress.”
Which might be misleading because it rarely feels good at the moment.
But hey, call it “good stress” because a certain amount of stress and anxiety has been shown time and again to keep us focused and motivated to achieve.
In fact, research shows that a healthy dose of stress can actually make us more resilient to cell damage.
Anxiety makes us brilliant problem-solvers.
If I were to gather 100 anxious people in one room, not only would it be absolutely humming with anxious energy. Like, can you hear the tapping, pacing, cheek-chomping?
But I can guarantee if I took a vote among those people to see whether or not they’d already considered 56 ways this gathering could devolve into chaos, it would be a unanimous, “Yes, well, I mean, only if you think so too.” And if you have anxiety, you already know that’s the closest we really get to an affirmative.
Remember what I said about anxiety being protection?
Anxiety prompts us to consider all of the various ways a situation could play out. Anxious folk plan for potential challenges and obstacles. They rehearse what they’ll say, how they’ll smile, and what they’ll be doing with their hands (the hardest part).
We’re actually better than more confident people at solving problems and making decisions when we reframe our anxiety as a positive coping tool. That’s because we’re really good at staying focused on what we’re fretting about.
Have you ever completely missed what someone said to you because you were too busy gathering evidence that they were mad at you anyway? I have, too.
So when a problem surfaces, we actually don’t struggle to block out distractions and come up with a solution, or 56.
Sometimes, anxiety can help us perform better than our more confident peers.
Everyone gets anxious sometimes.
They do.
It’s just that not everyone gets so anxious that they convince themselves not to leave the house because their friend sent them a cryptic text that obviously means they’re pissed off.
You see, even people at the top of their game get nervous. Athletes experience performance anxiety, which improves their focus and concentration, which could help them perform better overall.
In fact, the research shows that “higher levels of anxiety were usually associated with higher levels of effort and commensurately higher levels of performance.”
If you’re anxious like me, you just can’t bear the thought of embarrassing yourself by doing anything particularly badly. Even if you don’t feel confident, you still try your best because the alternative is too humiliating to even conceive of, let alone carry out.
There is a caveat to this, though. Anxiety really only helps your performance if you are able to make use of it the way the pros do. If whatever you’re doing becomes about the anxiety itself, you’re going to struggle to do anything remotely resembling a good performance.
But if you harness those feelings and make them work for you, you’re absolutely unstoppable.
Anxious people are more socially aware and empathetic.
When I walk into a room, I’m blessed (or cursed, depending on how you look at it) with the ability to quickly assess how every single person is feeling individually and judge the overall “vibe” of the group. Without saying a single word to a single person.
And I know I am not the only one.
Anxiety can make you more attuned to social cues. It can make you more aware of the dynamics of others’ relationships.
According to the research, this sensitivity gives you “elevated affective empathy tendencies,” Meaning anxious people are better able to identify and understand the emotions of others.
In fact, that same study also showed that anxious people have a better understanding overall of what might be going through someone’s head, including how they feel.
Final thoughts
So, how do you make anxiety the superpower it was always supposed to be?
Well, I doubt you’ll be surprised by my answer. But here are the tools I use anyway:
- Meditation to help me practice intentional thinking and mindfulness. Think of it like calmness training for those really stressful moments. I use meditation to teach myself how to stay calm and use my anxious energy to find solutions.
- Journaling helps me reflect on what triggers my anxiety and how I can try to use it next time to my benefit.
- WOOPing to rehearse exactly how I’m going to overcome the obstacles or meet the challenges I am so good at predicting.
Look: a little anxiety is good, but like most things, there can be too much of a good thing. None of the research I presented here specifies that a diagnosis of an anxiety disorder improves cognitive functioning.
If you have a diagnosis or debilitating anxiety sans diagnosis, you’re still probably going to need some support — like therapy or medication — to learn how to manage it effectively.
But shifting your mindset and using that anxiety to perform better in other areas of your life, connect with people, keep yourself motivated, and get better at rescuing yourself can be really beneficial and helpful in managing it.
And if anxiety is completely disrupting your life and impacting your ability to function in a healthy way, seek out help!
How do you already use your anxiety as a superpower? I’d love to know so I can try it out.
Thanks for reading!
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