"Just sit with it." That's the standard advice for anxiety.
Here is why it doesn't bring lasting relief to most people with chronic anxiety, myself included, and why it often makes things worse.
I spent years of my life sitting with my feelings, because so many sources promised it would eventually resolve my chronic anxiety. In reality, two things were happening.
What "sitting with it" was actually doing to me
First, every time I got still, so much of the emotion I'd tucked away and suppressed across the first 27 years of my life came flooding out that the sheer intensity overwhelmed my nervous system.
Second, deep down I still believed that negative emotions and intense physical sensations were dangerous. So even as I tried to sit with them, I was quietly pushing them away and blocking them, no matter how often I told myself I was safe and that this was okay.
Why chronic anxiety makes this so much harder
Chronic anxiety usually means it has been going on for years. Sometimes quietly in the background, sometimes in a very obvious way.
Because it has run for so long, there is a great deal of emotion that got suppressed, blocked and tucked away. That emotion is still in the body, and it wants out.
The moment you get still, it sees its opening, and it comes up as a flood. The nervous system can't cope with that much at once, which usually means one of two things: you can't function for a while until it all gets processed, or you simply shut down. Both tend to make anxiety worse.
And yes, plenty of experts tell you to do this in short windows, before you get overwhelmed. But if you are anything like me, fifty years wouldn't be enough to process it all that way. When you have suppressed emotion for as long as I had, it comes flooding in almost the instant you stop.
The part nobody accounts for
Most people who have lived with anxiety since childhood never learned to allow uncomfortable emotions and sensations in the body in the first place. That is one of the reasons the anxiety became chronic.
So when they sit with their feelings, they are inviting a huge wave of deeply uncomfortable sensation into a body that reads it as a threat. Survival alarms go off on every front. The body locks up, and the emotion coming up can't actually be processed.
They end up dysregulated for days, or they shut down entirely.
What actually helped
Here is how transformational hypnotherapy worked where sitting with it hadn't.
- It felt as though a barrier had been lowered, so I could finally feel my emotions fully without resisting them. I could cry them out and release them, and instead of being painful, it felt cathartic.
- It gave me deep insight into where my anxiety came from, and how I formed the beliefs that made me feel in danger. That insight let me understand why those beliefs are no longer true.
- Listening to a daily recording built around how I wanted to feel reprogrammed my reactions to triggering events, and dramatically reduced the intensity of the emotion they set off.
When "sitting with it" finally works
Once the backlog is cleared and your body stops seeing discomfort as danger, you can sit with the occasional anxious feeling for a few minutes, let it pass, and actually feel relief.
But as long as the intensity is that high, sitting with it will just overwhelm you again and again, until you break the cycle at its source.