E

E is for 'Egg It On.' It's time to go completely mad.

A for Anxiety is a weekly publication that takes an alphabetical journey through my life with anxiety.

It was some time in April 2010 when I barrelled into Euston station, fists (and no doubt, buttocks) clenched.

Marching onto the concourse, I tried to keep my breathing steady and gait even. Shoulders back, chin tilted upwards, I wanted to look confident and purposeful.

Like a candidate from the opening scene of The Apprentice.

Heading to the epicentre of the concourse - the eye of the storm - I dodged harassed commuters and impatient travellers until I reached the middle; dropping my bag to the ground.

Standing stock still, I took a deep breath and began.

‘Come on then anxiety’, I said to myself, ‘do your very worst’.

Staring straight ahead, I waited for madness.

Acceptance Needs Encouragement

So, what was I doing that fateful day some 13 years ago?

Was it an epiphany? A breakdown?

Both?

We’ve discussed (at length) the importance of acceptance when it comes to anxiety.

The willingness to tolerate its company, to continue writing our story despite its paper cuts, is what recovery looks like.

Acceptance is what takes the sting out of our threat response - it’s a tripped fuse and the comforting inky darkness that follows.

Yet, reaching acceptance isn’t easy.

It comes with prerequisites.

In order to accept anxiety, we firstly have to believe - with unwavering conviction - that it’s not harmful. That anxiety cannot hurt us.

We must know, resolutely so, that despite the intensity of its feelings and the darkness of its night, anxiety is self-limiting.

It runs the same track.

Each ride is not a new experience, but a familiar and predictable one. One featuring the same twists and turns, the same clouds of dry ice and shocks of cold water, as the one before it.

It’s a ride we’ve ridden many times; our mind’s very own Big Dipper.

As such, we must also know that this is a ride that will end. Despite the initial crushing weight of its G-force and the nauseating disorientation that follows, this experience cannot go on perpetually, nor can it get exponentially worse.

It’s neurologically rigged, chemically scaffolded, to follow the same route - over and over again.

After each ride, we will always pull back into the start and our restraints will be released. Sure, we might stagger off a little unsteady - our hair sticking on end and a bag of vomit in hand - but it’s done.

It’s over.

But, how do we build this confidence? This deep sense of knowing? How do we face anxiety with the bold, belligerent conviction that this is not a ride to be feared? That there are no surprises left in store for us?

The answer, my friends, is to encourage it - to egg it on.

We must climb back onto that scary ride and surrender.

Let’s Be Having You

It was my therapist (who else?) who first told me about the power of ‘egging it on’.

It’s a funny old phrase and one that has nothing to do with eggs - (disappointingly).

Instead, it’s thought to have its roots in the Old Norse word eddja, which meant ‘to provoke or incite’. Alternatively, others have speculated its etymology can be traced back to the now obsolete English verb ‘to edge’ - meaning to rile or aggravate.

Whatever its origins, to egg someone on comes with connotations of confidence.

It suggests a brazen sort of self-assurance. The knowledge that you can handle the consequences of your prodding; that you’re willing to strike a match beneath a pile of dry kindling.

But why?

Why would we want to ask anxiety to do its very worst? Why on earth would we poke the bear? Surely the entire point of managing anxiety is to placate it? To obediently follow its orders, while feeding it grapes and massaging it feet?

This, again, drives to the heart of what so many anxiety sufferers believe. We grip hold onto the misplaced belief that anxiety is unquantifiable, a limitless power. We treat it like a dictator, who, on a whim, could plunge us into insanity or heart failure - whichever they fancy.

We don’t want to know what happens when anxiety gets really mad; we don’t want to lose a hand. Naturally, we therefore work hard to keep it happy and subdued.

Smoke and Mirrors

Yet, anxiety is not a limitless dictator - its powers are finite.

Behind its hyperbole and rhetoric, its smoke and mirrors, is nothing but a normal, biological response. One that can only do so much and go so far.

Like any other emotion, anxiety is bound. Just like you won't unexpectedly cry so much you drown, or laugh so much you suffocate, so anxiety has its upper limits, too.

It's these upper limits that we want to experience - the line in the sand we want to draw.

This is where egging anxiety on can help.

Euston, 2010

Let’s return to Euston’s concourse - the setting of this tale.

If you remember, I’m stood in the middle of a large crowd with no immediate exits in sight. The next train home doesn’t run for another forty minutes and there’s no ‘safe place’ to hide.

My nightmare scenario.

You see, around this time, commuting into London felt like a near death experience.

As soon as my train passed Watford, my heart would begin to pound. The city felt vast and exposed; a warscape with no shelter.

I would step off my train and my anxiety felt limitless and unknowable; a broiling energy waiting to spill over. As I walked from the station to my office, I’d do my best to mop up its small spillages as I went - trying to keep it contained as best I could.

A brief sense of vertigo here, a splash of derealisation there.

The one thing I never did, however, was to take the lid off my anxiety and let it boil over entirely. That idea terrified me.

Until, of course, that one day in April 2010.

Anxiety? Where Are You?

On this day, I was to do things differently. As my therapist had instructed, rather than quietly pleading with my anxiety, I was to incite it.

I had to ask it to do its very worst, to demand insanity. To plead for it to send me completely mad.

And that’s what I did - stood in the middle of that rush hour crowd.

Initially, things felt very dramatic, very thespian. I felt like I was in a seance, waiting for some sort of dripping wet anxiety ghost to appear (à la The Ring).

I wouldn’t have been surprised if a storm had suddenly swept in - a gale forcing its way through Euston station, a plague of locusts in hot pursuit.

Yet despite these careering thoughts, I continued to stand there and wait, trying to generate as much anxiety as I could.

I was on the ride and I was screaming to go faster.

Minutes passed and not a lot seemed to be happen. I could feel the anxiety travelling through me - stopping by its normal haunts along the way. There was some tingling in my hands and feet, a heaviness in my chest. I felt a little disorientated and my breathing was shallow.

All parts of the ride I was used to.

Yet, and as time passed, these sensations began to ease. In fact, the more I demanded my anxiety got louder, the quieter it became. Like turning the torch on a shadow puppet, I’d revealed to myself it was just a hand, rather than a monstrous beast.

The longer I stood there, the more my confidence grew. I was beginning to realise something; a truth about anxiety.

For the 15 minutes or so I stood in the middle of that station, nothing happened - nothing at all. No anxious apocalypse befell me, no loud or violent descent into madness.

Instead, the more willing I became to experience anxiety’s rage, the calmer I felt. A grounding sense of control.

I’d asked anxiety to do its worst and its worst had been, well - lack lustre. No more than the regular loop-the-loops I was used to. If anything, it felt tamer than usual.

I walked to my office on a revelatory high.

This entire time I’d been shying away from anxiety, trying to keep it contained for fear of what it might do. And now? Now I realised it had all been a fallacy; a trick of the light.

My anxiety wasn't a ruthless, powerful dictator with endless resources to hand. It was just a sensation - one propped up by hyperbole and rhetoric.

Take this away and its power seemed smaller somehow, more harmless.

A bit like seeing North Korea’s Kim Jong-nam in Disneyland.

This was a turning point in my journey with anxiety, a point of no return.

I’d ventured over the parapet and reached the other trench, only to realise it had been empty all along.

Get Eggy

Years on and I still remember that moment in Euston station.

I let anxiety’s pot boil over and it simply boiled itself dry.

This was when I genuinely stopped fearing anxiety - fearing what it might do. I already knew what it was capable of, I’d already ridden its ride.

Following this, whenever I felt anxious, my campaign of incitement would continue. I’d ask anxiety to do its very worst and sure enough, it would retreat.

It felt like a magic trick, a superpower - and the more I performed it, the more my confidence grew.

Once I began to truly believe in the limited power of my anxiety, that’s when real acceptance followed. I could regard anxiety as an annoyance, rather than the prelude to something dreadful. I could live comfortably alongside it.

So, next time you feel anxiety’s waters beginning to bubble and boil, take a deep breath and egg it on.

Like good old Delia Smith at that iconic Norwich game, grab the mic and shout - bleary eyed - into the crowd:

Where are you?

Where are you?

Let’s be ‘avin you.

I promise you, your anxiety will be nowhere to be seen.

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