Alicia Clark Quotes

Rather than being a primitive response to fear, anxiety can be an efficient tool for growth.

The common perception is that anxiety is a problem that needs to be conquered. Yet seldom is the problem contained in the anxiety itself. Beyond the experience of anxiety and the problems that drive it is so often the potential fallout: The self-loathing that results from believing that you can’t seem to manage your experience better. The guilt and shame that you are somehow broken. The public condemning that ‘you should just snap out of it.’ The fear that you’ll never be okay. Repeatedly, well-meaning friends, health reports, doctors, and self-help experts advise anxiety sufferers to calm down, fight it, release the tension. Avoid it, ignore it, let it go. We have gotten the message loud and clear. We must make it go away.

But what if we’re working from a faulty premise? What is anxiety is not a monster to be tamed but a resource to be tapped? What if we’ve been falsely viewing anxiety as the enemy? What is we should be steering into the skid?

Through my experience and my work as a psychologist, I have developed a perspective on anxiety that seeks to embrace its value. I have come to understand anxiety as a powerful resource, encompassing important information. Anxiety can prompt us to pay closer attention to the message at hand and provide the motivation to take control. On a continuum of responses to anxiety ranging from impulsive to avoidant, I tend to aim for the middle-taking control. This is where I do my best, where I try to steer others, and, ultimately, is the purpose of this book.

But what if we’re working from a faulty premise? What is anxiety is not a monster to be tamed but a resource to be tapped? What if we’ve been falsely viewing anxiety as the enemy? What if we should be steering into the skid?

One of my professional missions is to restore anxiety to its rightful place as a positive resource….Rather than viewing anxiety as a force to be targeted and eliminated, I propose a more positive perspective, if we know how to use it. Anxiety can be harnessed as a positive force for change.

Exposure to stress can also be a form of strength building, which is what chemists call hormesis.32 The purpose is to build resistance to that stressor, as when a doctor gives us vaccines with low amounts of antigens to build up our immunity, or we strain muscles to fatigue in order to build them back stronger.

By the time we are aware we feel anxious, our thinking center is already engaged. Once that happens, we have access to more than just our habitual responses. We have access to choice. This is the start of control and change. Not just the perceptual kind, but the hardwired kind. Researchers have even put a number on how much control we actually have: 40 percent. According to data compiled by positive psychologist, Sonja Lyubomirsky and detailed in The How of Happiness, approximately 50 percent of variance in happiness is determined by genes, 10 percent of variance in happiness is determined by circumstance, and the rest of our happiness is determined by our actions.33 This is powerful information. “To understand that 40 percent of our happiness is determined by intentional activity,” Lyubomirsky writes, “is to appreciate the promise of the great impact that you can make on your own life through intentional strategies that you can implement to remake yourself as a happier person