Episode 131: The Surprising Connection Between Avoidance and Anxiety
In today’s episode, I want to wrap the month up and talk about the connection between avoidance and High Functioning Anxiety and give you some insight into High Functioning Anxiety vs Low Functioning Anxiety.
Let me check Instagram one more time.
Maybe I got an email? I haven’t checked for 10 minutes.
My glass of what is almost empty. Let me go downstairs for a refill. Stretching would be good right now, anyway.
Well, that break took a lot longer than I had planned. I got sucked into pulling some weeds while talking to my husband and then decided to make a snack.
Oh geez, I forgot to actually refill my glass.
Okay. Back at my desk. Before I start writing, let me check Instagram one more time. Anything new in my inbox?
This was me trying to write this podcast episode–avoiding and procrastinating. For me, this is all part of the process.
All this month we have been talking about avoidance and anxiety. We talked with Jacquette Timmons, about avoidance and money, Erica Drewry about our relationship with food, Bailey Parnell about social media, and Andrea Owen about avoidance, anxiety, addiction.
Today I want to wrap the month up and talk about the connection between avoidance and High Functioning Anxiety and give you some insight into High Functioning Anxiety vs Low Functioning Anxiety.
Avoidance and anxiety go hand in hand but you might be surprised to learn how.
Listen to the full episode to find out:
What the differences are between High Functioning Anxiety and Low Functioning Anxiety
How there really isn’t one type of anxiety that is better than the other
How knowing where you fall really helps with coping better
And how to avoid unhealthy coping mechanisms that we often develop around our anxiety
Resources mentioned:
+ Read the Transcript
Okay, let me check Instagram just one more time. Well, maybe I got an email. I haven't checked for like 10 minutes.
Well, now I need some water. I only have half a glass. Let me go downstairs and fill up my cup. And stretching, you know, that would be good right now. WOW! That break took a lot longer than I planned.
You know, it's not my fault. My husband was working outside, so I got sucked into pulling some weeds while talking to him. Well, then I decided I needed to make a snack. Oh, Jeez, I totally forgot to actually fill up my water glass. Let me head back downstairs to actually do that. Okay. I'm back at my desk. Well, before I start writing, let me check Instagram one more time. Oh, I mean an email; it's been like another 10 minutes--I might've missed something.
This is me trying to write this podcast episode avoidance procrastination, all part of the process, I guess. You're listening to the happier approach. The show that pulls back the curtain on the need to succeed, hustle, and achieve at the price of our inner peace in relationships.
I'm your host, Nancy Jane Smith, all this month. We're talking about avoidance and anxiety. Avoidance and anxiety go hand in hand, but not how you think today. I want to talk about avoidance and high functioning anxiety. While also giving you some insight into high functioning anxiety versus low functioning anxiety.
One of the sentiments. I hear most often from clients when I describe high-functioning anxiety is, "Oh, good. I'm not the only one". Or finally, that makes so much sense. I'm so glad I'm not alone.
So in that spirit, if you struggle with anxiety, I'm hoping this episode will help you feel less alone. When we have anxiety, we build up coping skills, sometimes healthy, sometimes unhealthy, in response to the anxious feelings inside.
If you have anxiety, you might feel a sense of dread, worry, lots of self-doubts, insecurity, and a sense of vigilance and overwhelm. That anxiety is how you see the world. It is a part of you, and something you deal with how you respond to that anxiety is important. You might be someone who is high functioning, which means in the face of anxiety, you push yourself harder and faster.
You take on more responsibility, go at it alone, engage in perfectionism and people-pleasing and hustle, hustle, hustle, in a sense, trying to outrun your anxiety. If you're someone who responds to your anxiety by low functioning, you tend to freeze in the face of anxiety. You hunker down, become more passive and rely more on other people.
As a reminder, one is not better than the other. In fact, as with most coping mechanisms, no matter your response, you shame yourself. High functioning people wish they could settle themselves down, and low functioning people wish they could propel themselves forward a bit more. Whether your response is high functioning or low functioning, both cause us pain and leave us feeling crappy.
It's important to know the difference between the two responses so you can recognize your anxiety through your behaviors. Many people, when they think of anxiety, think of the traits of low functioning anxiety. They don't realize that the hustling, pushing, going it alone, perfectionism, and people-pleasing are actually a result of anxiety.
So in showcasing these two reactions to anxiety, I want to help you see where your anxiety might be coming out and how you can take action to help. Then there is another separation of anxiety, chronic anxiety versus acute anxiety. Acute anxiety is in response to a stressor, a big deadline at work, a sickness in the family, or a massive worldwide pandemic, all-cause acute anxiety.
Whereas chronic anxiety is ongoing. I have chronic anxiety, which means on a daily basis, I deal with anxiety. It's always there. And through coping skills, I can keep it controlled. It's similar to having a chronic health condition like diabetes or arthritis. It's always there, and it might flare from time to time.
So in times of high stress, such as living through a worldwide pandemic, those with chronic anxiety have their normal everyday anxiety and then throw in some extra anxiety about the world as we know it changing. It's the difference between having pain in your legs because you overdid on your workout and having joint pain in your knees on a daily basis.
And all this month, we've been talking about avoidance. Again, avoidance looks different for those who have low functioning anxiety, and for those who have high functioning anxiety, people with low functioning anxiety are very aware of their anxiety. For the most part, they know they're anxious and what they're anxious about, and they will ruminate on that stressor.
Their avoidance shows up as being passive, avoiding the stressor, procrastinating on the stressor, and even sabotaging their own success. To quiet the nonstop ruminating, they might over or eat a pint of ice cream. They will obsess over social media to escape from their own words. Many of my clients, high function in the face of anxiety, and their anxiety is chronic.
Meaning it is with them all the time. They might experience more anxiety during stressful situations, but for the most part, anxiety is a part of their brain. For people with high functioning anxiety, avoidance looks very different. Many people with high-functioning anxiety are completely unaware that they're experiencing anxiety.
They know something is off. They know they feel unsettled, but rather than facing that unsettled feeling, they push on harder and faster. The more anxious they feel, the more they hustle and avoid those feelings. If you ask someone with high functioning anxiety, what they were anxious about, they probably couldn't tell you with any specificity.
Whereas someone with low functioning anxiety could tell you exactly what they're anxious about. Someone with high functioning anxiety isn't avoiding the stressor; they're avoiding themselves. So they will use alcohol, food, spending social media to numb out as well. But it's not to numb the feelings; it's to settle themselves after pushing so hard.
So in order to relax, they will engage in numbing activities. Both types use all the things we discussed this month to avoid, but for very different reasons, low functioning anxiety is numbing because they're so tired of feeling and high functioning anxiety is numbing because they're so tired of pushing, as Andrea Owen said about her drinking and anxiety and episode 130, that when it rolled around a four o'clock and her anxiety had been building all day, even if her intention was not to drink, she couldn't handle it without a drink.
Knowing where you fall allows you to know how to cope better with your anxiety. Because I help people with high functioning anxiety, my work is around building self loyalty, getting in touch with your feelings, building a relationship with yourself, and quieting the monger who is telling you to go go go. If you have low functioning anxiety, help would come from learning how to move through your feelings and not get stuck in them, mindset work, and shifting your ruminating thoughts and worries.
I just cannot express enough how figuring out the difference between these two responses of low functioning and high functioning has been such a game-changer for my life and my work. For so many years, I tried to treat my anxiety with low functioning anxiety tools and just made it worse. Shifting my mindset and pulling myself away from my feelings was not what I needed.
It was the opposite of what I needed. Once I realized that treating anxiety for someone with high functioning anxiety involves totally different tools. Everything shifted for my clients and me. And because those of us with anxiety love to have everything in black and white and tied up in a neat box. I want to caution you that these two definitions of high functioning and low functioning are on a continuum.
There may be times you use coping skills that are high functioning, and there may be times you use coping skills that are low functioning. People tend to have a preference, but it isn't an either-or scenario all the time. So back to avoidance, because I really want to continue to pull apart these two methods of functioning when it comes to avoidance, avoidance is part of both types. It just shows up in very different ways.
Here's an example. It's a simple example. You're given an assignment at work to present on a new project you just started in front of the entire office. With low functioning anxiety, you immediately freak out. Your response to this fear is to avoid the project altogether. You procrastinate on the task, putting it completely out of your mind because whenever it comes up, you're on the verge of a panic attack, and you just can't face it. You may, in fact, sabotage the task in some way. When you do start working on it, you miss deadlines and only do the task with a half-hearted attitude.
Putting all your energy into it is just too scary. So two days before the presentation, you're lamenting to a coworker about this project. And so they, probably someone with high functioning anxiety, jump in to take over for you and rescue you from having to present at all. These avoidance behaviors are not necessarily based on conscious choices but in response to an underlying fear of being judged, humiliated, or exposed as a fraud.
For those with high functioning anxiety, you also have avoidance behaviors in response to an underlining fear of being judged, humiliated, or exposed as a fraud, but it shows up very differently. Your Monger is loud, you know, you're going to fail and let them down. So you procrastinate until the last minute.
But you're driven by this fear of failure. You let the idea percolate in your head, you work around the idea, you get your desk already, your research the right way to use the technology, or see if there's actual research on the project you're working on. And at the very last minute, you start actually working on the presentation.
Once you get your butt in the chair, you work your butt off, getting every detail right. And you go above and beyond the call of duty. The morning of the presentation, feeling like a fraud, you grab a couple of extra donuts and pour yourself an extra-large coffee with cream because you deserve it after all the carbs don't help.
And as you step up to the presentation, you feel like you might just puke, but you can't run now, what would people think? So you step up on the stage, and almost as if you were channeling a professional speaker, you take control of the situation and pull off an amazing presentation. You walk off the stage, your coworkers are congratulating you, but you can't take the praise because you just keep thinking of all the ways you did it wrong and could have done it better.
You escaped your office, exhausted, depleted, and almost on the verge of two. With high functioning anxiety, you do the actual task. You run toward the thing that is most scary, but the avoidance strategies come in very different ways. You avoid feeling anything about the task. You avoid being fully present around the project.
You avoid owning your success because your anxiety and your Monger are telling you that if you do face anything, you will be exposed for the fraud. Because we're living in extremely high anxiety time, I would be missing something if I didn't use this time as an example. During the past few weeks, clients have said they're feeling out of control, fearful of the unknown, and full of insecurity and doubt.
And here are some of the ways low functioning anxiety and high functioning anxiety have shown up during this worldwide pandemic. If you have low functioning anxiety, you might be having a hard time concentrating. So giving yourself an out about working too hard, leaving the groceries and other tasks to the rest of the family, you're going back and forth between oversleeping and undersleeping.
Probably have your days and nights even confused, having a hard time, doing anything other than obsessing about the news while curled up on the couch or going days without watching the news while bingeing, Netflix curled up on the couch.
If you have high functioning anxiety, you've probably been overworking, even though you're having a hard time focusing. Over-planning obsessing about the groceries, focusing on homeschooling perfectly, forcing yourself to constantly be doing, being creative, trying something new using this time to be beneficial, you might have trouble sleeping, but you're jumping out of bed to make sure you're using the time production.
Sticking to the schedule as much as possible and beating yourself up when you fail to stick to it, looking outside of yourself for the right way to do this and obsessively reading articles on what to do and how to feel. And both of these types might use food as a numbing tool. As Erica Drewry the dietician and nutritionist explained in episode 128, you might be overwhelmed or you're avoiding a difficult conversation or a feeling that you don't want to feel.
Do you know what works for both types of anxiety? Awareness, and kindness. The very nature of high functioning anxiety is avoidance avoiding our feelings, avoiding what's really going on, looking outside of ourselves for answers and wisdom. Again, the reminder that one way is not better when it comes to coping with anxiety, people who appear high functioning can be in distress in the same way that people who are low functioning can be one is not more.
They're both simply responses to anxiety and avoidance is a huge part of both. Those of us with high functioning anxiety have been taught that our quirky behaviors, our overarching need for control and doing it right, or because we're high strong or type a, and that might be true. And for many of us, those behaviors are a sign of something underneath that is way more debilitating and overwhelming feeling of being found out.
As the fraud we feel inside, it is a carefully constructed house of cards designed to appear solid and strong, but in reality, is consumed by doubt and insecurity. The one theme in all the podcast episodes this month, from money to social media, to alcohol, to food, was until we stop avoiding and pretending we have it all together.
We won't heal. The first step in the healing process is looking ourselves in the mirror and saying, I see you. I get it. Let's lay it down for a few seconds. Let's put down the hustle, the appearance, the, I got this. Let's be kind. Let's admit we don't have it. And that is okay.
Helping people with High Functioning Anxiety is a personal mission for me. I have a special place in my heart for this struggle because it’s both something I dealt with unknowingly for years, and because it silently affects so many people who think this is just how it is.
Working with me this way is an incredibly efficient and effective way to deal with your anxiety in the moment--without waiting for your next appointment.
I have been doing this work for over 20 years and Coach in Your Pocket is the most effective and most life-changing work I have ever done. My clients are consistently blown away by how these daily check-ins combined with the monthly face-to-face video meetings create slow, lasting changes that reprogram their High Functioning Anxiety tendencies over time.
Over the course of the three-month program, we meet once a month for a face-to-face session via a secure video chat, and then throughout the entire three months, you have access to me anytime you are feeling anxious, having a Monger attack, celebrating a win, or just need to check-in, and I will respond to you during my office hours (Monday through Friday, 9 am - 6 pm EST).