Anxiety

Anxiety And Making An Important Life Change

By  | 

Making an important life change always means trading the comfort of the known and familiar for the discomfort of the unknown and unfamiliar. It’s the creeping anxiety cued off by the prospect of venturing into unknown, unfamiliar territory that prompts the myriad excuses and rationalizations used to feel okay about standing pat. Deep down it’s known beyond the shadow of a doubt that making the change would be the best course of action but anxiety bars the way.

The felt inability to honestly confront, or even consciously recognize, the existential anxiety cued off by the unfamiliar helps explain why so many people remain in undesirable, unwanted situations. Undesirable and unwanted, yes, but also known and familiar. The unconscious reasoning goes “My current situation might not be ideal but what’s out there could be truly horrifying. Better to stay here where everything is safe and familiar.”

At the conscious level the anxiety is barely noticed, it’s pushed aside by all those clever excuses and rationalizations. The excuses and rationalizations are employed in order to smother out the true emotional reason for not moving forward with the life change by centering instead on intellectual reasons for not moving forward with the life change. These intellectual reasons are rife with faulty thinking patterns and cannot stand up to critical analysis.

The excuses and rationalizations need to be actively challenged so that a path can be cleared to make the conscious connection between a possible important life change and the painful existential anxiety engendered by that possibility. As long as the anxiety is ignored or minimized the paradoxical likelihood is standing pat, since the anxiety doesn’t go away it’s simply buried under a pile of clever excuses and rationalizations.

Related posts:

  1. Changes To Customary Patterns Of Life From the existential point of view all changes to customary patterns of life produce painful anxiety. It doesn’t matter if those customary patterns of life are desirable or undesirable, if they create conditions for growth or conditions for stagnation, if they’re loving or abusive, positively reinforcing or negatively reinforcing. With existential anxiety it’s all the […]...
  2. Coping With Upcoming Life Transitions The prospect of moving from the familiar to the unfamiliar, which is what all life transitions entail, produces existential anxiety. Whether the change is desirable or undesirable, freely decided upon or forced, the threat of nothingness that is existential anxiety will be lurking underneath. A lot of strange behaviors, like outbursts of anger, terrifying dreams, […]...
  3. Preoccupied With Life Changes “When I accept myself as I am, then I can change.” – Carl Rogers The paradox about life changes is that when you are too preoccupied with them happening you actually get in your own way, stunting your growth and making the changes you desire less likely to happen. Of course if you don’t think […]...
  4. Helping Clients Get Over Their Fear Of Change This is going to sound blatantly obvious but for clients to derive any benefits from the therapeutic endeavor they have to be willing and able to change. The reason we bring it up is that a deep seated fear of change is not specific to the problems people bring to therapy but is an underlying […]...
  5. New Year’s Resolutions And Stages Of Change When we make New Year’s resolutions we’re likely to take these declarative statements at face value, only later coming up with rationalizations for why they didn’t work out. Last year we looked through the lens of behavioral psychology to show why these resolutions are so hard to keep; this year we’ll use ideas from motivational […]...
  6. Understanding The Stages Of Change While motivational interviewing was originally conceived as a way to treat drug and alcohol addiction its applications are much more far reaching than that. We’d actually make the case that all significant life change can be plotted along the stages of change, that any worthwhile behavioral changes must pass through these stages. Probably the most […]...
  7. Drifting Through Life When we say someone is drifting through life we usually mean it in a derogatory way. But aren’t we all drifting through life in the sense that we had no control over being born, can’t control that we will die, and can only control a tiny fraction of the happenings around us? Existentially speaking, those […]...
  8. Setting An Intention To Change Regardless of the presenting problem, what we usually see from clients is that they dearly wish to overcome that problem but have no idea how, which is obviously why they’ve booked a session in the first place. If they were able to make the change all on their own seeing a therapist would be unnecessary. […]...
  9. Becoming Determined To Change Behavior Meaningful Change Doesn’t Happen Overnight Patterns of behavior that start to negatively affect life tend to fall into the ‘entrenched’ category. They’re not usually one-off screwups but rather typical, relied upon ways of being meant to cope with anxiety and other environmental stressors. This is why a lukewarm, ‘it sure would be nice if I […]...
  10. Stop Complaining and Start Making a Plan Many are deeply unhappy in their lives but experience a tremendous amount of inertia. Some of that inertia is justified in that sometimes our external environments won’t support an immediate drastic change. For example, maybe you despise your job, but quitting right now without a backup plan might not be financially feasible. The problem though […]...
  11. Unobserved Life Many psychologies focused on the individual miss the fact that all human life occurs in a social context, even when others aren’t around, and most problems are social problems, problems in relating to others. Our culture celebrates the individual and puts individualism on a pedestal, but come on. Life would be pointless without others to […]...
  12. Doing Nothing To Combat Anxiety When faced with a threat to our well-being or the well-being of the people we care about we all feel compelled to take action. Existential anxiety is the threat of nothingness. We inherently know the best way to alleviate that threat and the painful feelings cued off by it is by doing something, not by […]...
  13. Putting Off Making An Important Decision If you’ve been putting off making an important decision the culprit is death anxiety. While death anxiety has its root in the threat of the obliteration of our biological organisms we humans experience death anxiety in its symbolic forms too, where it’s not anything technically ‘alive’ on the chopping block but the same existential dread […]...
  14. Let Intentions Carry More Weight Than Feelings When making important life changes we can think of our underlying intentions as the foundation upon which the house of change is built. Just as a house will collapse without a solid foundation the process of change will collapse without solid intentions. Those intentions emanate from increased conscious awareness around why, how, and what. Why […]...
  15. Energizing To Change Your Life For The Better What is the single greatest threat to going all in on changing your life for the better? It’s that despite your very best efforts you’ll still come up short, you’ll still fail. A powerful rationale that keeps you entrenched in maladaptive patterns of behavior is that you could change things if you really wanted to. […]...
  16. Change The Practice Of Your Life For all the good that psychoanalysis has done in widening the sphere of understanding of the human condition, and you would be surprised at just how many words and concepts from psychoanalytic theory are now common parlance, one pesky assumption that started with Freud and still goes strong today despite the lack of any evidence […]...
  17. Use Your Newfound Insight To Change The Practice Of Your Life A lasting effect of the psychoanalytic tradition on the common understanding of how therapy works is that increasing insight leads to cure. The idea in psychoanalysis was that bringing unconscious drives, motivations, and other hidden material into conscious awareness was the endgame, the way to eradicate neurosis. The problem though, and the various therapeutic paradigms […]...
  18. Make a Desired Life Change Today Gripped by Powerful Inertia Most of us are fully aware of the life changes we need to make to be healthier, happier, more productive people yet we’re gripped by powerful, hard to describe inertia that keeps us stuck in the same old patterns of behavior. Map Out the Necessary Behaviors for Change We could get […]...
  19. Discover What is Important to You “Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.” – Meister Eckhart A life-affirming aspect of grief that many people do not fully take advantage of is that it creates a stark opportunity to figure out what is […]...
  20. Important Problems The worst thing you can do is minimize the importance of your partner’s life problems. The objective fact is that both of you filter reality through your own subjective lenses, there’s no way around that, but you can recognize this fact in order to keep yourself from projecting your subjective perception onto objective reality, seeing […]...
Related Items