Anxiety can sometimes be a tough one because on one hand we don’t know when to push, and on the other we don’t know when to pull back.
As adults who feel anxious, how do we know when to push ourselves to do the next thing and how do we know when to scale back.
Increasing your window of tolerance:
Something that can help guide you is the idea of increasing your window of distress tolerance.
For example; I feel anxious about recording videos to publish online. My job is to try and extend my window of distress tolerance which means that I need to sit with the anxiety and frustration I feel when recording them. The more I sit with my feelings and the more I push myself to do it despite how I feel, the more I increase my window of distress tolerance and the more normal this feeling will become for me. It will also improve my ability to capture what I want to communicate in the videos.
I know that if I just pull back from that feeling, I’m never going to increase that window of distress tolerance and do the thing that I really want to do, which is help people.
How to know the difference between when to push and when to pull:
If I feel like I can still get what I want even though I am feeling distressed, and I get 80% through what I need to get done, then I’m in a good place. 80% success is good enough.
If I feel like I can’t get what I want even though I am feeling distressed, and I get only 20% through what I need to get done, then it’s too much distress and I know I need to pull back.
It’s important to celebrate the attempt of getting something done and sitting with the distress of the situation, and recognise that pulling back is okay. It can be revisited at another time.
Growth comes from being just a little bit outside of our comfort zone – not so much so that no progress can be made because it’s all too much.
It’s when we pull back completely and avoid doing the task as a result of anxiety that it can be problematic. Then it feeds the anxiety.
We want to keep coming back to these things that scare us over and over again to increase that window of distress tolerance.
Choose one area where you can just increase it by a tiny bit. Maybe sit with the feeling for one or two more minutes than normal. Stick with it. Then celebrate that you’ve done it for that amount of time. The more you do that, the more distress you will be able to tolerate as you work closer towards getting what you want without the fear.
