Hi everyone, my name is Misha, and I’m anxious.
I’ve written that I’ve felt regular anxiety since about eight years old, and that only on antidepressants did I finally understand what it’s like not to be anxious in the background. Anxiety that keeps you from falling asleep and hijacks all your attention is impossible to love — but you can learn to love functional anxiety.
Recently I changed jobs. New job — new communication styles, new people; my usual ways of solving problems don’t work, and I have to look for new ones, including in how I communicate. And there’s nothing scarier for an anxious person than accidentally offending someone — with a request or with feedback. So this Saturday I spent two hours thinking about how to improve my situation. I asked myself questions, asked ChatGPT, asked friends; ChatGPT asked me questions… And finally, after two hours I managed to dig up a small phrase in my memory that had set me on edge. It doesn’t really matter what exactly bothered me — what matters is that after two hours, from the irrational thought “something went wrong,” which got drowned out by the rest of the workday, I was able to draw conclusions about a colleague, about my interaction with them, about how others interact — and how to make all of that better. If on Friday I was just a great product manager, by Saturday afternoon I’d become a great product manager who can resolve one more specific type of conflict.
And all of that — thanks to anxiety. At the root of anxiety is a heightened sensitivity to other people’s feelings, and where others would walk past, I create a two-hour problem for myself — but I solve it. For that to work, anxiety has to act as a trigger for this:
“Okay, this is a situation my intuition is highlighting as wrong. Let’s dig deeper — and stop digging if we see we’ve solved this before!”
And not as a trigger for this: “Okay, this is a situation my intuition is highlighting as wrong. Let’s think about how it could hurt me in 14 million timelines of the universe, including 13,999,987 scenarios with probability approaches zero.”
Heightened sensitivity is like a lower pain threshold. A person with a lower pain threshold is unlikely to become a great boxer, but they will go to the doctor in time when they feel stomach pain and won’t let it turn into gastritis. That’s exactly why we should thank and love our anxiety — it gives us, anxious people, signals, and it’s up to us how to use them.
You could say, “That’s all well and good, but can’t you just be less anxious?”
And I’d say: “I’m afraid not.” From everything I understand about anxiety, it’s driven by a certain hormonal balance in my brain, and by childhood dynamics with significant adults. You can’t make me 185 centimeters tall no matter how much you want it — and you can’t turn me into a person with dramatically lower cortisol production either. But you can teach me to use anxiety not as a weakness but as a superpower — and then I’ll say:
Being anxious can be a badge of honor.