Anxiety Therapy San Francisco—How To Control Your Anxiety: a Paradox

As an anxiety therapist in San Francisco, one of the chief reasons people come to me is to learn how to “control” their emotions, especially anxiety.  Ironically, trying to control their emotions may be what leads to a problem in the first place.  For most people controlling emotions looks like stuffing their emotions down, ignoring them, or simply pretending that they are born without emotions.  This is problematic for a number of reasons. 

Emotions are signals that we need to pay attention to something in our lives.  They are not facts—we can get angry over something patently ridiculous, like needing to get up and go to work each morning.  Is the emotion still worth acknowledging? Yes, of course.  Is it worth giving a ton of weight to or acting on?  Perhaps not.  The trouble comes when we decide that not feeling the emotions (even ones that arise for seemingly ridiculous reasons) is better.  The decision to ignore or decidedly not feel certain emotions can be conscious or unconscious and may be a way to control our actions—yet shutting down emotions has unintended repercussions.  Here are a few of the outcomes that can happen:

1)    We become numb to all emotions or feelings, not just the ones we are trying to avoid. 

We can’t selectively numb certain emotions.  So, if you decide not to feel your sadness or your fear or anxiety, you will also be deciding not to feel your joy or happiness. 

2)    Our emotions and feelings become bigger and more overwhelming than if we dealt with them as they arose.

Ask anyone who has anxiety what happens if they continually ignore the feeling.  Often the anxiety will get bigger, possibly leading to panic attacks.  Again, emotions are signals that we need to pay attention to something.  Maybe we need to reassure ourselves or simply examine a situation more closely but the failure to acknowledge the emotion (even when it is off base) can cause the intensity of the emotion to increase.

3)    When we finally deal with all the emotions we suppressed, it can feel overwhelming. 

This is totally normal—our feelings may try to rush out all at once because we gave them an opening.  However, feeling overwhelmed by unexamined emotions may cause people to continually ignore their feelings because the prospect of sorting through them is so daunting.  If that is the case, please find a mental health professional who can help. 

Since the idea of “controlling” our emotions might lead us to more difficult feelings (in both intensity and frequency) than we started with, it may be a better goal to understand and possibly befriend our emotions.  This requires learning about our emotional landscape and learning how to give ourselves what we need emotionally. 

Certainly we can learn to control our actions we associate with certain emotions but attempting to control the emotions is not a worthy goal. If you are curious and would like to learn more about anxiety therapy in San Francisco with me, please click here