If I had a penny for every time someone has told me that “it won’t be anywhere near as bad as you think it’ll be”, I’d probably have enough to buy myself a coffee.
Not a plush hazelnut latte with oat milk you understand, but I’d probably get a good way towards a crappy coffee from a vending machine at a Tesco Express.
My point is that people have told me this often, and I’ve dropped the same wisdom on many people myself…yet neither I nor all the people I’ve said it to ever seem to feel any better about their anxiety.
I recently went to a meeting where I felt sure that I was going to be given some bad news. I’d been worrying about it for weeks, and there was nothing I could do to sway the outcome. 2 people told me that it wouldn’t be as bad as I thought it was going to be, but even though I knew they were probably right – I refused to let myself relax.
The day of the meeting came, and things went almost exactly as I’d pre-empted. I was given the exact information that I was dreading, and felt my stomach drop just as I’d imagined it would. There was even a little caveat that made things worse….but it wasn’t as “bad” as I thought it was going to be.
What I mean is – there were no bombshells to blindside me and turn my life upside down. I wasn’t suddenly given 10 days to live, and nothing came as a great shock.
You could actually say that everything went to plan.
I’d set my own expectations, and they were met with gusto! I would even go as far as to say that it was a relief to finally get the meeting over and done with, as I no longer had to agonise over it.
You could call that sense of relief closure, but I think there was something deeper at play in this scenario.
As much as it pains me to say – I think that on some level I actually wanted to wallow in the bad news that I knew I was going to hear. I knew there was nothing I could do to influence the outcome, and I wanted to give the sinking feeling that came with it full recognition.
It’s a bit like when you break up with “the love of your life” when you’re a teenager. The world seems to crumble, and instead of picking yourself up, placing yourself around positive people and moving on, you decide to mope around your bedroom listening to sad music, remonstrating on how cruel the world is.
You are fully aware that you’re dragging your feet and making things much worse than they need to be, but you carry on regardless, and wallow in being the victim.
I think we all do this from time to time. Whether we’re secretly hoping that a magical Hail Mary is going to come and change the situation, or simply worrying – we let ourselves soak up negative feelings until we’re saturated, and then once the thing concludes, we realise that it wasn’t actually that bad.
I’ve completed the same cycle over and over again, and it’s horrible, so I recently decided that it was time to disrupt the pattern and to take charge of these negative thoughts!
As with all productive behaviour – I started with a brainstorm, and quickly came to the surprising conclusion that it’s far more simple that I thought it would be….
I can’t say that what works for me will categorically work for everyone else, but it all seems to come back to the persona you adopt.
I believe that we choose which character we’re going to play when confronted with a problem. Depending on how much energy and motivation you have, you’ll choose to come at things from the position of either a predator or as prey.
If that sounds weird, you could instead say that we either adopt the mindset of a victim or of someone who overcomes obstacles.
Either way – they kind of amount to the same thing.
Prey Mindset
It might sound reductive, but we all know what it looks like when someone takes on the characteristics of prey. They view the world as a place where they have little control over their destiny, and when life deals them a blow – they react from a stance of weakness, as if things happen TO them, and therefore they don’t have to take responsibility for anything bad that follows. They don’t need to (or can’t) fight.
They rarely take ownership of mistakes, and find it easier to complain about their situation than to deal with things and move forward.
I don’t mean to come across as judgy. I’m far from perfect, and have acted as prey on many occasions, whether I chose to or not, but the point is that we instinctively understand when someone is “playing the victim card”, and although it might feel comfortable – it will never move you forward.
There is also a movement to prey that we all sense, and that alters the way that we interact with a person.
If you think of the animal kingdom, prey moves quickly and often erratically, as if always ready to evade a predator. This skittish movement can be seen in body language, rate of speech, and even in the pheromones that we give off (and are only subconsciously aware of).
When facing a difficult scenario that you’re feeling anxious about, it’s the prey mindset that can sabotage your emotional state, and leave you feeling as though you have little or no control over the outcome. You accept your fate, and allow overwhelm to set in, and although you’re likely to discover that “things didn’t turn out to be anywhere near as bad as you thought they would be” – you’re leaving your mental state in the hands of fate.
Fortunately we rarely encounter genuine threats nowadays, and (depending on where you are in the world) there’s not really much need for us to worry about being attacked by wild animals. So this cycle of feeling anxious – and then it coming good in the end – might not appear to be causing you any damage. It’s better to perceive a threat and then for it not to matter right?
Wrong! This cycle is doing us some pretty serious damage in terms of our mental health. If you let it continue, you are conditioning yourself to be prey, and that will inevitably end in a predator taking advantage of you!
Predator mindset
On the flip side, there is the predator mindset – not to be confused with the predatory behaviour of a sex offender.
I’m talking about the behaviour that a lion displays – the slow/smooth/purposeful movement, the self confidence, and the strength that everyone around a lion can sense.
A lion doesn’t roll over when faced with a threat. A lion gets up and sorts the problem out. He never leaves his or his family’s security up to fate. He leads, and exudes power.
When facing a difficult situation, we have the option of being the lion…the predator – which means we can take matters into our own hands. We can fight!
If I had of approached my meeting with the mindset of a predator, I wouldn’t have felt anxious. I wouldn’t have been dreading the outcome….and it still wouldn’t have “turned out to be as bad as I thought it would be”.
I think there’s a valuable lesson to be learned here.
We can approach our problems in life from a weak position of victimhood, and we can suffer – leaving the outcome up to the direction of the wind, or we can come at things from a position of strength, of confidence, and we can fight to get the outcome that we want, regardless of which way the cards are stacked!
Worry is senseless, and even though it might feel like the easiest way to react when you perceive a threat, action will always trump overthinking things.