Writing Through Anxiety

Like many people, I’ve struggled with anxiety for most of my life. When I was 16, I started therapy for generalized anxiety and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. At the time I thought I’m doing this so I can be cured, not having the life experience to know I’ll probably struggle with these things forever.

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As I got older, my anxiety and OCD got more manageable, but it has always ebbed and flowed, and my OCD reared its ugly head vengefully in the beginning months of the COVID-19 pandemic. My intrusive thoughts told me that everyone I loved was going to die and I was going to be alone in this world. I counted down the days my husband last went into the office, crossing my fingers that he’d get past those first 14 days without showing symptoms. I cried on the phone to my mom every day telling her how afraid I was of what felt like inevitable death that would soon surround me. I thought I would never see my baby niece again. I washed my hands raw all day for months until the skin would crack and bleed. It catapulted me back into serious health anxiety that, after we received our life-saving vaccines, I was going to the doctor every month for new and different tests, convinced there was something fatally wrong with me that we weren’t catching.

My morbid thinking was all-consuming. On a writing retreat with friends, I woke up and sent my husband a “Good morning!” text. A few hours rolled by, and I still hadn’t heard from him, which is unusual for us. So, I texted again, and then I called. He didn’t answer. I texted and I called. Nothing. On and on, until I was in a complete panic and had envisioned what felt like the only true thing: Someone broke into our house and killed the love of my life. I was pacing around our Airbnb, my friends staring, worried about me. I called our neighbor to ask her to see if the front door was unlocked. She wasn’t home, but she said she would check for me on her way back. Then my husband finally called me. “Hi,” he said casually, groggy. “Sorry, I overslept.”

My feelings oscillated between immediate relief and almost unbearable embarrassment. It made focusing on writing—the whole point of the retreat I was on—almost impossible. I got very little done that weekend, and when I got home, I told my husband that I thought it was time I find a therapist again to help me with my spiraling anxiety and intrusive thinking.

There’s plenty to feel anxious about right now. Minute-by-minute we are alerted to some new impossible tragedy: politicians forgoing their promise as elected officials to protect the people, fires destroying entire communities, our planet begging us to keep it alive. It can overwhelm the senses, and it can lead to the feeling that what we do doesn’t matter. What’s the point? What’s my silly little story in the grand scheme of things?

That doubt is your anxiety trickling in, because the truth is that your silly little story matters very much. Art is what perseveres in the face of unparalleled, seemingly endless suffering. When the weight of the world leads to anxious thinking, it’s natural to make ourselves small and what we have to say even smaller. And I won’t deny, it’s hard to feel creative when anxiety strikes. In my experience, there are two ways to help write through anxiety: setting realistic expectations and being kind to yourself.

Set Realistic Expectations

For some people, writing is therapeutic—it’s the balm they need when they’re anxiety is flaring up. For others, their anxiety is what’s distracting them from writing at all. I’m in the ladder camp. When I’m particularly anxious and when my anxiety triggers my OCD, writing feels literally impossible. And not just writing—reading, watching a movie, going for a run, cooking … all the things I enjoy in my daily life suddenly feel like a chore.

The difficult task for me is in actively trying to engage with what I love despite the anxiety I feel. Of course, when forcing oneself to do something, it feels less enjoyable. But that’s also part of the job of writing, with or without anxiety. It won’t always be fun. In fact, I often don’t enjoy writing, I enjoy having written.

Setting realistic expectations is pivotal in feeling successful as a writer when the anxiety hits. Some ways to set the right expectations could be:

• Read through some of your old writing and do some light editing—but don’t do too much, just enough to get your mind back into the world you were building.
• If writing full scenes and chapters feels like too much, spend some time outlining where you want your story to go.
• Study what an average number of words a day is for you, and slash that in half. When anxiety strikes, less is more.
• Don’t be afraid to pivot; work on more than one story at a time, the shift in stories can help keep your anxiety at bay.

Be Kind to Yourself

Last year, I was in a session with my therapist, and I’d been in an anticipatory anxiety spiral about something coming up in my life. When that’s happening, I tend to try and imagine every possible scenario that could come from the thing that’s giving me anxiety. Then, when I was in another session after the event (and everything ended up being fine) I shared that I always feel embarrassed and angry at myself for wasting so much time in morbid fantasy, assuming and preparing for the worst-case-scenario. But my therapist said, “Don’t hate your anxiety, because sometimes it’s your superpower. Your anxiety is just protecting your body and mind from something it’s perceiving as a threat.” And that changed how I view my anxiety completely. I always saw it as something I needed to overcome, not something to work alongside.

That perspective has helped me with the guilt I feel when my anxiety feels like it’s winning. Instead, I see it as my anxiety telling me to take a break, to stop trying to force normalcy when everything around me feels so not normal, especially when it’s coming from something out of my control. So, if my anxiety is telling me to take a break from the thing I’m trying to do to curve my anxiety (in this case, writing), that isn’t my anxiety winning over me. It’s trying to help me, so that the next time I sit down to write, I’ll be more successful.

Listen to your body and mind. I’ve never been the kind of person that thinks ignoring something makes it go away. If your anxiety makes too much space at your writing desk, it’s OK to not force what isn’t happening. Be kind to yourself, and ways that you can do so is:

• Move your body; if you sit down to write and your anxiety is louder than the idea in your head, get up. Stretch. Take a short walk to clear your mind.
• Do some breathing exercises. 4-7-8 breathing and alternate nostril breathing are my two favorite for stress-relief.
• Engage with your community. Reach out to your friends, chat with a neighbor, stop by your favorite local indie bookstore.
• Do something mindless but stay off your phone. Get into crochet or needlework, or keep a puzzle infinitely unfinished and work on it for a moment.
• Stop writing. Sometimes, to keep the writing going we have to stop writing.

There is no shame in taking care of our minds. In fact, as writers, it should be a requirement. Our mind is where our characters live and where we build our worlds. Don’t they deserve the clouds to clear as much as we do for ourselves? Try and remember that sometimes, our anxiety isn’t our enemy—it’s simply our minds protecting us from something. Learning to live with it can help us learn how to write through it.