What Does Living With Chronic Anxiety Feel Like?

Just like the devil himself, burnout is one of the monsters who walk away once you call them by their name. But, unlike burnout, anxiety does not disappear. Rather the opposite; whenever you think about it and call it its name, it only gets bigger as you start feeling anxious that you’ll get anxious.

I’m writing this article to share my thoughts about anxiety. A monster I have to live with for my entire life. So, how does it feel to be anxious?

Have you ever been to an amusement park, to one of those humongous roller-coasters that first lift you 20 floors into the sky and then make you fall down like a bag of potatoes?

So, the good news is that anxiety is like a roller-coaster ride 365 days a year. You wake up in the morning feeling like your feet didn’t touch the ground: your heart is pounding, your stomach twisted. And you feel like you are in a free fall.

How fun! Rollercoaster for free.

Imagine that feeling when you are taking a flight and descending toward the airport. It’s like falling and falling in higher dimensions. How fun indeed.

Now the bad news: anxiety is like a roller-coaster ride 365 days a year. No free days.

What Is the Blue-Eyed Monster of Anxiety?

My day usually starts with trying to calm down and persuading myself that it’s not the reality but rather, a big, furry, blue-eyed monster that asks for my attention. According to Lieberman and colleagues (2007), putting feelings into words dampens the brain’s amygdala response to negative emotion. It always stands somewhere in the shadows looking at me with sadness in its eyes, just like a forgotten pet.

It’s quite a disturbing sight. However, on the good side of things, no one knows about my monster (well, unless I decide to write about it) which lets me live semi-normally.

For the past few years, I almost forgot about the monster’s existence. My doctor figured that we could get rid of it with medication, and so we did.

One little pill a day and I felt peaceful like never before. And everything was fine ever after, except…

How Do Anxiety and Paranoia Change Your Focus?

…except all my life energy evaporated.

I still seemed functional: I was slowly progressing with my projects, I travelled, I was building a brand for my company. BUT, to build something new, innovate, and disrupt your field, it’s not enough to just do what’s necessary. You have to be FIERCE.

You have to be a bomb of energy. You have to take full control over your life and press the power pedal to the maximum.

Whereas I felt like my energy was leaking. I was gaining weight for no apparent reason. I had an increasing desire to take naps during the day.

I was spending an increasing amount of time in the morning gearing up for work. I became extremely distractible. At some point, it felt almost impossible to unglue myself from watching YouTube movies and focus on my own life.

I was spending 80% of my energy trying to put my mind to focus. And the remaining 20% was left for the actual work.

And then, it became obvious that the medicine had side effects that blocked me from reaching my long-term goals. I decided to quit.

That’s how the monster came back. But together with the tremble and the pounding heart, the energy was back.

Is This The Price To Pay?

I sometimes wonder: are paranoia and anxiety the price to pay for laser focus and creativity? Perhaps. Anxiety makes me laser focus on anything that propels me forward and makes failure less probable.

Whenever I feel deeply anxious, the survival mode is on and even YouTube and Netflix are not attractive enough to make me step away from the chosen path and stop working. According to Eysenck and colleagues (2007), anxious people often protect their performance by investing extra effort in the task. When I am in survival mode, nothing can stop me.

When on medication, I used to feel less tremble in my body… but my thoughts were extremely shaky, like unstable attractors. I felt like my working memory was overly shallow. And it was way too easy to pop out of any mental state accidentally.

Now I feel the catabolic effects of stress on my body. But my mind is like a surface of a lake — nothing can distract me.

Perhaps, sometimes it’s just better to accept the way you were born instead of trying to biohack your neurotransmitters with drugs.

Can Anxiety Actually Make You Fearless?

And now the joke. In the process of struggling with anxiety, I realized that this is what actually makes me push myself out of my comfort zone. According to Yerkes and Dodson (1908), moderate arousal improves performance, while too little or too much arousal hurts it.

The thing is: I don’t have a comfort zone. So, if regardless of how you spend your time, you feel anxious and shitty, then why not do big things?

In fact, I feel the same tremble in my body while sipping tea on the porch of my garden in the Netherlands and while standing on stage talking about the future of work in San Francisco. So, why not stand on stage? You see, anxiety occupies so much space in my life that there is no room left for actual fear.

And, you can compensate for many weaknesses just by being fearless and shameless.

What Happened at the Customs?

I decided to write this text after a conversation with a guard at SFO customs last week. I was just coming back to the US and I was stopped at the border for a little interrogation. So, this is what happened.

The border patrol officer concluded that I tend to spend way too much time in the US given my business visa. He requested to see my mailbox, business meeting invitations, and my bank account.

He looked concerned and asked me how I was planning to sustain myself with only $500 in my account. I responded, “Now you sound like my parents” and smiled.

It was just hard to explain that I didn’t have any capacity left for stressing out about things that would normally twist people’s stomachs, such as being 10,000 miles away from home and with a drained bank account. I just don’t.

Why Radical Honesty About Anxiety?

One might ask: why do you write a text about anxiety as a leader of a business? Isn’t that shooting your own foot? Well, I believe in radical honesty in leadership.

I stopped caring about “what if I get less attractive to people?” ages ago.

As a matter of fact, some of the most successful people in the world are also some of the world’s biggest paranoids. According to Andrew Grove (1996), Intel’s former CEO, only the paranoid survive in business. This is what mother evolution promotes — anxious people and their monsters.