Interesting Reads | For Anybody Whose Mind Be Racing

Did you know that Black folks can be experiencing anxiety without ever calling it anxiety? We’ll say we’re stressssssed. Overwhelmed. Tiiiiiired. We can’t sleep. Our minds won’t stop. We’re always waiting for the other shoe to drop. But if the doctor asks if we have anxiety? No, we’re just dealing with a lot. Researchers have been warning clinicians for decades that Black people may describe emotional distress differently from the language they were trained to listen for, which means anxiety can be missed or misunderstood entirely in our community. Now, while I don’t feel compelled to try and convince more of us to embrace that label, what I do know is that the experience of your thoughts being so intrusive that they hinder your ability to live the life you want can be crippling. It causes pain, and it most definitely will block you from fulfilling your purpose. So what I am compelled to do is share knowledge that can heal. I have something special this month for anyone whose mind be racing sometimes. Grab your tea and let’s talk about anxiety 🍵.

I know this is Interesting Reads, but I’m sharing a video I want you to see this month. Please just roll with it!

How to Stop Avoiding Life is a 20-minute video from Dr. Ali Mattu, a brilliant clinical psychologist and YouTuber who specializes in treating anxiety.

A lot of people who struggle with anxiety (paralyzing stress) spend their lives waiting for it to go away. They are waiting to feel calmer, more confident, or more like the person they were before anxiety took over. Thats when they plan to start dating, work on the creative project, or make the career move.

But as Dr. Mattu explains, waiting for anxiety to go away can leave you stuck and avoiding the very parts of life that would make it feel meaningful and fulfilling. In the video, he shares five concrete, research-backed strategies for changing how you respond to anxiety so that you can start living more fully, even if anxiety is still present.

I really encourage everyone to take the 20 minutes and watch this one. After you watch it, choose one of the five strategies to practice. Pick the one that feels most approachable to you and actually use it. I promise things will start changing.

Your anxiety may not go away. There, I said it! While this can be a hard pill to swallow, what is also true is that you can change the way you interact with your anxiety (intrusive thoughts). And doing that is how you begin getting your life back when stressing has stolen so much from you.

One of the strategies Dr. Mattu talks about in the video is for us to treat our anxious thoughts like spam. Spam shows up in our inboxes every day trying to get our attention. We see it, recognize it for what it is, and usually archive it, delete it, block it, or create a filter to automatically move it to the junk folder.

Every now and then, though, spam gets me. It has shown up frequently enough or with a sensational enough subject line that I finally open it. And every single time, I’m like, “Ugghh. This is not important. This has absolutely no value to me.”

That is how we can begin to think about some of our anxious and intrusive thoughts. If you wake up in the middle of the night worried about something, the thought can feel incredibly important. Anxiety delivers everything like it is an urgent message that needs your immediate attention. So you pay attention to it. You think about it over and over. You play back and forth games with it, analyze it, overanalyze it, and spend hours trying to reconcile it.

But a thought showing up is not evidence that something is wrong. Moreover, neither the frequency of a thought or the intensity of a thought are evidence that something is wrong either. Anxiety makes you feel like you are being responsible by examining every possibility and preparing for everything that could go wrong. Meanwhile, you have given hours of your life to a thought that may not have deserved five minutes.

Changing how you interact with thoughts is something you have to practice. You notice the thought. You recognize what is happening. And then you work on not following it wherever it wants to take you.

We often ask people with anxiety to imagine what their lives would look like without it. But for someone who has lived with anxiety for years, that question can feel way too big. So we can make the question smaller by asking, what is one thing that is worth working through your anxiety for?

Maybe it is being the parent you want to be. Maybe it is being the auntie you want to be. Maybe it is having the relationship you want. Maybe it is fulfilling the purpose and calling on your life that you know is just sitting in your spirit.

You only need to identify one thing to motivate you enough to start trying these strategies. It will be your reason to start practicing these hard and courageous things. I really encourage you to watch the full video. Dr. Mattu breaks down this specific strategy and four others in such great detail. It makes it super easy for you to start trying these today. Watch how your life will change.

Finally, here is the question I’m sitting with this month:

What is one thing in my life that matters enough to me that I’m willing to work through my anxiety for it?

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