Anxiety Symptoms and Finding Relief: The Fitness Analogy

If you listened to our last podcast, you know we answered questions that came to us in a few different ways. One of them was taking a little venture out into the wild. I find it genuinely interesting to see what people are asking out there, and to compare it to the things I used to ask back when I was in the thick of my own struggle.

Now, this might raise a red flag for some of you who know our work, because we generally recommend staying out of these communities unless they are carefully curated and moderated. That is still true. As a rule, they do more harm than good, and finding a few good questions to answer does not change that advice. But taking a brief sample from the places where people vent and ask questions does give us a chance to check the pulse, and to find topics that might help the people struggling right now.

And that is a good reminder that you can always reach us. If you have a suggestion for the show, a question you would like us to answer on an episode, or any other comment, please write in and let us know. We read every one.

Why we fixate on one symptom

Spending time in a few of these places recently, I noticed that one of the most common questions today is the exact same one it was back when I first started. People asking about one specific symptom.

It can be anything. As we talk about in the book, anxiety sufferers tend to define their whole condition by the symptoms they happen to have. Some people only have one or two. So if someone struggles with depersonalization, they will often call their condition depersonalization, rather than calling it an anxiety disorder, which is actually far more accurate and far more helpful in the long run. Of course, that is very hard to see if you have not done this work yet.

I know this one firsthand. Early on, morning anxiety was my biggest issue, and it stayed my primary issue for a large part of my struggle. So naturally, I went looking for solutions to morning anxiety. We have touched on it on a few episodes, and I promise I will do a whole show on it soon. But it is a perfect example of framing a disorder level anxiety problem through a single symptom.

Out there in the wild, I found people asking how to make repetitive thoughts stop. How to make burning skin sensations go away. Dizziness. Air hunger. Chest tightness. A racing heart. Any symptom you can name. As we discuss in the book, there are hundreds of them, and probably no fewer than fifty to a hundred that are extremely common and shared among people who have several at once. But those who suffer with just a few, or with one loud, predominant symptom, tend to become hyper focused on making that one thing go away.

The man who chased his symptom

I remember someone from the early days of my own struggle, back when I was part of some Skype calls with an anxiety therapist. He was having visual issues, and he spent all of his days trying to change things in his life to fix them. Glasses. Eye doctors. Adjusting his computer screen. Working on his screen less. You name it, he tried it.

I remember thinking at the time, how can so many people have so many different symptoms? How could one person be tortured by something another person barely noticed, while that same person carried an intense hatred of a symptom the first one could shrug off?

It was never really about the symptom

The answer started to come together as I learned more about sensitization. Sensitization is a physical state, a condition where the nervous system becomes overtaxed, overreactive, and worn down after an extended period of stress, worry, and certain behavior patterns. Once I understood that, it became much clearer. These symptoms were artifacts of a larger process. Smarter people than me had tried to tell me that already, but when you are in the middle of the suffering, all you really care about is making the symptom you hate go away.

Here is the bad news. I have never met a single person who recovered by chasing one symptom at a time.

And here is the good news, which is much bigger. I have met and worked with dozens of people who made all of their symptoms go away, or reduce so greatly in intensity that they no longer ran the show. They did it by addressing the core of the problem instead. An oversensitized nervous system, unproductive thought patterns, and the behaviors that keep the whole thing running.

To fix one thing, we start at the root, and we fix everything.

This is a truth that applies to all of anxiety recovery, and I have honestly never seen it disproven. If you are struggling with one symptom right now, that might sound like bad news. I promise you it is the best news I could give you.

The fitness analogy

To me, this is a lot like certain things in fitness.

Most of us, especially those of us who are a little older, have hit a stretch here or there where we were trying to knock off a few pounds. If that has never been you, consider yourself lucky. But even those of us who stay active usually have to work at it, and we end up doing our share of research. I remember being younger and thinking how great it would be if I could just lose a little around my midsection. I have heard plenty of other people say the same thing about one area or another. A little spot reduction.

As it turns out, that is not how it works. The idea that we can lose weight in one small, specific corner of the body has largely been disproven. But when we work through a real fitness program and bring our body fat down across the board, those stubborn areas tend to improve right along with everything else. So, just like anxiety symptoms, real fitness and healthy ratios are far better served by an overall approach than by trying to fix hyperspecific spots.

A fitness journey has one more thing in common with working through anxiety. It creates different challenges for different people. As you reduce your symptoms, you might find that one or two are a little more stubborn than the rest. I certainly did. That is because every body is biochemically different. Our DNA and our internal wiring get a say in how these things go. But underneath all of that, human anatomy shares a lot of the same core principles, and one of them is this. Whether you are working through your fitness or working through your anxiety symptoms, your effort and your mindset need to work from the top down.

That means starting with the right mental approach. Zooming out. Addressing the thing as a whole, instead of micromanaging every single part of it you happen to be unhappy with.

You may not even notice it happening

During my own recovery, which I lay out in the book, I found this to be true in a way I did not expect. For some of us the process is so gradual and so slow that we do not even notice symptoms leaving. We are too busy focusing on the one we hate. Then one day you wake up and realize that the one you hate is not as loud as it used to be. And in that same stretch, two or three others that used to plague you are simply gone, and you barely registered them leaving.

That is desensitization. That is the nervous system bringing itself back into balance after a long stretch of hyperstimulation. It is a natural process, and we support it by doing the right mindset work. It does not take anything complicated or special. It takes consistency, understanding, and a commitment to a few very simple but very important truths about the condition.

Here is something else worth knowing. When one symptom fades, another one sometimes becomes the new thing your brain latches onto. A lot of people think they have developed a brand new problem, when in reality the anxious mind has simply shifted its attention somewhere else. That is one more reason we do not chase individual symptoms. We keep working the same underlying recovery process, and we let the whole system settle.

So take heart. Whatever symptom has your attention right now, it is nothing special. It just happens to be the loudest one in the room. And like all the rest, the volume can be turned down, and eventually turned all the way off, when you address it with the right mindset.

That is what the book is really about. Not chasing symptoms one by one, but starting at the root, so the whole system can finally come back to balance.