Why Am I So Anxious All The Time?

Journaling is a great way to release unexpressed emotions that can otherwise accumulate and make us feel anxious. Here is an example of some free-flow journaling that I did last year at a time when I was feeling particularly anxious. It helped me identify and release how I was feeling, so writing it felt very cathartic.

I am so anxious sometimes that it’s literally hard to breathe. Why, why, why, why, why? Or more importantly, what can I do about it? Where is it coming from? I’ve been contemplating this recently, and here are my thoughts:

Is it my Health?

After 11 years of chronic illness without really knowing what was wrong, I was finally diagnosed with severe obstructive sleep apnea 10 months ago; which is proving rather challenging to treat. It is potentially life threatening but it’s not like I sit around worrying about that all the time. It is also potentially soul destroying and that bothers me more. I’ve just reached the end of an 8 week series of neck & throat exercises that I’m hoping will help but I haven’t got the desired result yet. I’ll probably need to continue the exercises for an indefinite period and there’s no guarantee they will work. My sleep specialist seems to think they won’t, but he doesn’t even seem to know what causes sleep apnea, and I don’t want to follow his advice of just getting a CPAP machine and sleeping with a mask for the rest of my life until I’ve explored all the alternatives. Learning to play didgeridoo helped a little, but not enough. Another alternative is surgery, but it has a low success rate and is also potentially life threatening.

Feeling exhausted all the fucking time just drives me batshit crazy. In parallel with the 8 weeks of exercises, I’ve also been doing a Kristen Linklater’s Freeing The Natural Voice program which I’m hoping will free some of the tension in my throat that may be contributing, I’m in Diana Marshall’s O2 Advantage program in the hope that it will help, I sleep with a mandibular advancement device that makes my jaw ache more than I would like, and I’ve signed up to do a singing workshop at The Conservatorium of Music to give those throat muscles a real workout. I’m desperately hoping that the combination of all these things will cure my sleep apnea and alleviate my daytime tiredness and flu-like symptoms; otherwise I’ll be sucking through that mask thing I hate until I’m old and grey while never getting a really good night’s sleep again. I’m doing all I can but there are no guarantees and while I’d like to be comfortable with uncertainty… in reality I’m really not.

Is it my Environment?

I’m on holidays staying at my favourite youth hostel. I always have fun here and meet interesting people. I’m constantly anxious about whether I will make friends though. I always do. Like, always. But still, the anxiety persists. Today I picked up a guitar and started playing; which is something you’d think I’d be pretty good at given I’ve been playing for over 10 years and spent the last 3 years studying music full-time, almost have an advanced diploma of music performance and my primary instrument is guitar. Nevertheless I was super-nervous. I couldn’t even play Wonderwall for fuck’s sake just because there were other people in earshot. There are heaps of gorgeous backpackers half my age walking around here and the whole thing freaks me out.

Watching a movie in the lounge last night with about 4 other backpackers, I was so nervous it was hard to breathe. A cute girl who seemed a little upset came in and started talking with the girl sitting right next to me. I think it was about a guy. After a while their conversation started to bug me since I just wanted to watch the movie. I felt nervous about letting them know that they were distracting me, as I haven’t historically felt comfortable with being assertive and the potential conflict it could lead to. But given that I felt so nervous I could hardly breathe anyway, I decided I had nothing to lose. I turned to them and said as politely as I could: “Excuse me, but I’m finding your conversation distracting. Is there any chance you could take it somewhere else please?” The girl next to me gave me a filthy look, got up and made as much ruckus as she could collecting her belongings before storming off. People get upset; what can you do? At least I got to watch the rest of the movie in peace.

Is it my Mother?

I’ve had 30 of therapy trying to deal with the impact of my controlling, narcissistic, emotionally unavailable mother. Shit man, that mother would can run deep. She rang me the other day and said: “Graham, we haven’t seen you in a while and we’d like to see you. Would you like to join us for lunch at the club tomorrow?” I sensed no hint of manipulation, guilt-tripping, passive-aggressive bullshit or any other nonsense that she used to go on with. It was a simple, assertive declaration of her desire to see me with a practical invitation that would be easy for me to accept. I was like: “Who are you, and what have you done with my mother?”

I have a better relationship with my mother now than I ever have, and the more I let go of expecting her to be any certain way that would meet my needs, the better it gets. However, the fear-based conditioning I got from her could still be running in my nervous system. Or am I just anxious that since she’s no longer acting like queen bitch, I’ve got no excuse for not having my life sorted out yet?

Is it my Father?

Several recent conversations have highlighted the fact that with most of those 30 years of therapy revolving around my relationship with my mother, I’ve still got some unresolved issues regarding my father’s contribution to my life. The older he gets, the more he lives in his own little world and the less emotionally available he becomes; which is saying something given he wasn’t ever really emotionally available in the first place. I have felt tremendously lonely in my relationship with my father, and the tantric people would probably say that since he’s the stereotypical source of my masculine energy, it’s no wonder I am anxious all the time.

I still feel like a boy who never grew up trying to make it in an adult world. I realise that whatever I got from my father is all I’m going to get. He’s recovering from cancer for fuck’s sake so his life revolves around doctors visits, transfusions and medical treatments; not around me. He sometimes says that he neglects me and should ring more often, but he still doesn’t. I have to call him. Nevertheless I’m grateful just for the fact that he’s still alive to spend time with; even if we don’t really connect.

Unexpressed emotions can leave us feeling anxious

Is it my Studies?

I’m 3 months away from completing 3.5 years of studying music performance at Ultimo TAFE. During that time, I’ve worked hard, learned a lot about music, built great relationships with all the teachers, discovered how to navigate the bureaucracy and formed quality relationships with many of my classmates. Others who feel toxic to me, I set boundaries around and have as little to do with as possible. Just when I’ve got to the point where I feel comfortable with it all, it’s about to end. Going to TAFE was like going back to school. I got to deal with a lot of latent insecurities that would have taken god-knows-how-long to uncover in conventional therapy.

With TAFE coming to an end and with the continuing constraints of my health preventing me from performing regularly, I’ve applied through UAC to The Sydney Conservatorium of Music and UNSW to do a Bachelor of Music degree focusing on contemporary music performance. Both require submitting examples of my work, which fortunately I can prepare at TAFE. Another student who suffers from tremendous anxiety was asking last week how she was ever going to be able to have a career as a singer if she’s so anxious even just off-stage, and I wondered that for myself too. The university application process involves a fair bit of work submitting recordings, videos, an interview and an online test. I really want to be accepted; but fear of rejection is my core wound. I met a cute girl who is studying jazz piano at The Con last week while auditioning for the vocal workshop, and she said “If you don’t get in, just try again next year.” I thought that was great advice for taking the pressure off. I passed the audition for the vocal workshop at least, so that gives me a little more confidence that I might get accepted into their degree program. Plus I chatted up a cute girl!

To be successful as a musician I need to learn to collaborate. It’s not currently one of my strengths because I don’t really trust other people. I still get self-conscious even just playing instruments in class because I fear other people’s judgement so much. In songwriting workshops in the past, I always ended up getting stuck with some domineering woman who didn’t listen to my ideas and just wanted to control the whole process. They remind me of my mother. Yick. I stopped going to songwriting workshops. I’m getting better at setting boundaries around these people to keep them out of my life, but it’s still a little nerve wracking contemplating collaborating with others. At The Conservatorium Open Day the guy in charge of the course I want to do said the willingness to collaborate was one of the main things they were looking for when they interview new students. I could keep a straight face while saying that I really wanted to learn how to develop that skill; but I couldn’t honestly say that I love collaborating… yet. When my best friend at TAFE said “I’d rather gouge my own eyes out than have to write a song with (another class member who we both find particularly domineering)”, I felt a lot better. On the upside, a class member who I have great banter with texted me today to ask if I want to do a podcast with her and I quite like the idea of collaborating with her, so perhaps there is hope.

Is it Eurovision?

My most recent song is called “Nervous” and is about the anxiety I feel around women who I find most attractive. It was a very confronting process to write, demo, record and play the song to my class. I felt like it was exposing something that I still struggle with and feel deeply ashamed of. Nevertheless, I quite like the end result. I’ve even entered it into the Eurovision Song Contest.

I’m both excited and terrified of the prospect of it getting chosen as one of the Australian candidates, which would mean going to the Gold Coast to perform it on TV, and if I win that in The Netherlands in front of 180 million viewers. I’ll probably need to put a band together and I don’t have much time. I have no idea what the chances are of being successful but I’m proud that I’ve at least entered. I am incredibly self-conscious about my voice and break into a sweat even just playing the recording of the song in front of my class; let alone singing it live in front of a massive audience. That vocal workshop I’m about to do had better be good.

Is it my Career?

Sometimes I wonder what the fuck I’m doing trying to become a musician, or a comedian, or a comedy therapist (whatever that turns out to be). Why couldn’t I just do something easy? I only have 15 years until the usual retirement age and I’m competing against kids who started playing music when they were 5. I first picked up a guitar at age 40. My first single didn’t sell and I had to acknowledge that this is because it’s not very good, as I wasn’t very experienced when I wrote and recorded it.

Meanwhile I keep working on songs for my first album and hoping it does better. I’ve studied a lot of successful musicians to find out how they did it. The Beatles grew up playing music and spent a year solid in Germany playing 8 hours a day before they started churning out hits. I’m way behind the 8 ball. I gotta find my Unique Selling Proposition or I’m gonna fail. I can’t compete against session musicians who have been playing all their lives; not that I really want to mind you. But I’ve got bills to pay and eventually I’m going to run out of money.

I think I’m more anxious about this than I like to admit. It’s all very well to say “Follow your dreams!” and that you can switch careers at any time, but it takes a long time to build up experience and experience is key to success. I’ve seen countless people close to me quit or even just not start following their dreams since I’ve been trying to follow mine. I didn’t succeed at building a the huge passive income I was hoping for through my internet business, although it provides me more coaching clients than I have the time and inclination to work with.

Now that I know I have sleep apnea, it’s possible that I’d enjoy doing the high-paid engineering work I used to do again once I get it treated effectively; but I’ve come so far down the musician/rock-star/comedy path that I only imagine myself sitting in an engineering meeting thinking: “I could be on stage now if I hadn’t given up on the dream…”, and feeling less than 100% motivated to design that new widget that’s going to save the planet. One of my mentors once said: “Don’t die not knowing”.

Is it Other People?

Even though I’m 51, I’m still freaked out just talking with attractive women. Being around men can be a challenge too, at least until they lower their guard a bit so I don’t take their standoffishness as a personal rejection. I really want them all to like me, and it derails the whole social process. I sometimes feel like a complete fraud having created The Confident Man Project and worked as a confidence coach when I still have so much social anxiety myself.

In a session with a new client last week, I found myself feeling nervous about whether he liked me or not. Oh for fuck’s sake. Yet in reality, I’m really good at coaching anxious people because I totally get where they are coming from. Later in the same session he started talking about his relationship with his emotionally unavailable parents, I suggested that his infant brain may have been wired for social anxiety by the experience, and gave him some empathy which led to a breakthrough. His response was: “Wow. I thought my last therapist was really great; but this is like a whole other level.”

When I started my coaching business I used to joke with my coach that I felt so nervous talking with women I met because I was convinced that they didn’t want to be talking with me, yet all my initial clients were female and they were willing to pay me for the privilege of talking to me. I really relate to my anxious clients so I’m great at giving them empathy, but the truth is I’d just like to feel less anxious myself. I don’t want to go see yet-another-therapist myself though; I want to fucking graduate!

Is it my Age?

I didn’t really set out in life with a plan, but I remember wanting to find a girl I liked and get married, as though that was the secret to happiness. Which was weird considering how miserable being around my parent’s marriage made me. All that didn’t work out the way I had hoped, and I remember feeling anxious about whether I would ever find anybody. Getting into relationships has always been really challenging for me. I’m 51 now and I’m still single.  I’m not attracted to 51 year old women by any stretch of the imagination. I take some solace from the fact that many creative artist men end up marrying late in life. I’m not exactly sure why that is but maybe if I can get myself sorted out I’ll attract someone I’d like to get hitched with.

I’ve had two women propose to me in my life, and both times I was devastated to reject the offers. So were they, but I just couldn’t see it working out. It never occurs to me how old I am when I’m meeting people. When the 18 and 21 year old girls I was hanging out with at Port Macquarie Backpackers last week asked me how old I was, I didn’t want to answer. Eventually we did the guessing game thing and when they got it they were really surprised. I felt exposed and vulnerable, and sensed an uncomfortable lull in the conversation. It could be my paranoia but I felt their energy towards me shift. I told myself that it didn’t matter but it took some work to shift that energy back to where we were all laughing and having fun together again.

Is it Trauma?

When that new client I mentioned sent me a long email asking a zillion questions about his anxiety I thought: “OK, he’s anxious and his conscious mind is trying to sort out a solution; but it’s not going to work because it’s not the problem”. I never ended up answering the questions, I just talked to the guy and gave him some empathy until he started crying out the trauma and his nervous system calmed down. By the end of the session, he said he felt much more relaxed. I see empathy work for my clients all the time but somehow it hasn’t yet been the magic bullet for me. I was talking about my fear of negative evaluation with another coach friend of mine who recently did the let’s-give-away-some-free-sessions thing; and to be honest, he was rather dismissive of my fears. He said I “had a romance with my anxiety” or some such bullshit. Well maybe I do, but how is that supposed to help?

I’ve found it hard to get a really empathic response from other people when I’m feeling anxious. This is what I want to teach the world: the power of just saying “I hear that you’ve feeling anxious”, without any agenda or trying to fix it or make the person suppress it or giving them a shame or guilt trip. Why are people so uncomfortable with people being anxious? Well, I felt plenty anxious with that fellow student at college when she shared how fearful she was. I’m not sure if that’s because I’m still uncomfortable around women with strong emotions having grown up with a stoic mother who didn’t share hers, or because as a fellow student it’s not as clear how I should respond as it would be if she were a client. But I hung in there anyway because I could empathise and she found it helpful. She was even open to my suggestion of reading Peter Levine’s book Waking The Tiger since she’d talked about trauma being stuck in her nervous system. Maybe I’m still attracting these people because I’ve got the same thing going on. That shit can certainly go deep.

Is it Running Out Of Time?

One of my mentors once said to me: “You’re anxious because you don’t know who you are”. It immediately resonated with me as being the truth, and I still think it is. The process of self-discovery is taking rather longer than I would like though. A bit like the character Andy Dufresne says in the movie The Shawshank Redemption: “I just didn’t think the storm would last as long as it has.”

Is it just Excitement?

I’ve clearly got a lot going on. No wonder I’m anxious. Gurus tell me that excitement and anxiety have a similar physiological response. I definitely suppress my excitement out of shame, so perhaps I’m just not used to feeling alive.

I’m going to leave it there and go hang out with some backpackers. Or just sit and watch the movie if there’s one on. My head hurts.