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How to Stop Feeling Anxious about Anxiety by Time Box

Anxiety is an Emotion, Not an Illness​

  • The Necessity of Anxiety: Anxiety is not a disorder but an essential emotion that has a purpose. It is the feeling that tells us when something is important and demands our attention. Without it, people would not turn up for important events, have careers, or maintain relationships.
  • The Unhelpful Medical Model: Seeking medical help for anxiety often leads to a diagnosis or label that makes the person feel like they have an illness or are "broken," creating a brand new thing to feel anxious about. A medical solution (like medication) to a non-medical problem will at best only patch over it .
  • Anxiety is Not the Enemy: People who want to "get rid of" anxiety view a part of their mind as actively trying to destroy them, concluding their mind is broken. This is the fundamental mistake; you don't get rid of anxiety, you change your relationship with it.

The Ship Analogy (Understanding the Mind)​

Box uses the analogy of a ship to explain the brain's emotional response:

  • The Captain (Conscious Mind): This is your logical, rational, conscious thinking—the part that knows where you want to go and why.
  • The Crew (Subconscious Mind): This is your subconscious, in charge of automatic responses, patterns of thought, and emotions.
  • The Crew's Goal: The crew operates on one simple principle: to find the best strategy for the most happiness and safety. Even seemingly self-destructive thoughts are designed to steer you away from potentially unhappy experiences.
  • The Mistake: Anxiety is the crew's way of shouting to the captain, "You need to pay attention to this". The crew often makes mistakes because their decisions are based on old, outdated, or wrong lessons learned in childhood.

Three Steps to Overcoming Anxiety​

Box describes three things he did to reduce his own social anxiety:

  1. Refuse to Believe You Are Ill: He decided not to feel anxious about feeling anxious, recognising that his anxiety was always triggered by a situation or thought process, not random.
  2. Listen to Your Crew: Instead of pushing away the anxiety and trying to ignore it, he listened to what his mind was trying to tell him. When you ignore someone with an important message, they start to speak louder (shout). When you start listening, the crew stops shouting, and your logical thinking (the captain) can be heard.
  3. Always Be Kind to Them: He began to talk to himself (his crew) with kindness and positivity, instead of beating himself up. A demoralised crew (low self-esteem) leads to anxiety at the slightest challenge. By building yourself up, you empower your crew to do their best work.

He concludes that once you accept anxiety as a natural part of the human experience and treat it as a trusted friend, the crew will get back to sailing the ship, and you will feel less anxious about anxiety.