Can we cure anxiety? No. Are we stuck just managing it? Also no.

When trying to understand anxiety these days, it’s almost impossible to get a straight answer. On the one hand, we see medical websites telling us we can’t cure it outright, but we can manage all of the symptoms through medication and talk therapy. But on the other, we’re starting to see people who have had panic attacks for their entire lives going on to never experience another panic attack again using certain methods. 

So what’s the deal? Can we cure anxiety or are we stuck managing it?

The answer is, well… neither. Or more appropriately, that’s not the right question to ask.

In an earlier post, I showed how asking questions like “is worrying an issue of nature, nurture, or somewhere in between?” prevents us from finding the actual answer: “it’s not any of those, and the actual answer is something completely different.”

The question “can we cure anxiety or just manage it?” is the same, and here’s why.

Anxiety is like pain. We can experience pain for a number of reasons - we exercised too hard, pulled a muscle, or ate too many donuts. In all of these cases, the problem is not the pain itself. Pain helps us identify when we’ve done something to damage our body, like overwork our muscles or overeat. 

When we tear a muscle, the solution is not to deaden our nerves so we never feel pain again - that might help us feel good in the short term, but it does nothing to fix the problem at the core. Rather, we need to stretch out the muscle and apply targeted physical therapy techniques to it. This allows the muscle to heal, and as a byproduct, the pain slowly goes away on its own. 

Anxiety is the same - there are very specific behaviors that cause us to experience much worse anxious symptoms and lead to panic, such as ones I discussed in an earlier post. Trying to deaden our sense of anxiety may make us feel okay temporarily, but it does nothing to fix the unhealthy behavior that causes it, like spending hours and hours each day recalling uncomfortable memories and thinking about problems that we have no control over. When left unchecked, this behavior can do even more damage to our lives than the symptoms themselves. But when we fix these behaviors, the symptoms fall away on their own, allowing us to recover, as I’ll discuss in a future post.

So to recover from high anxiety, the question isn’t “can we cure it or are we stuck managing the symptoms?” but rather “can we change the behaviors that cause it so that the symptoms go away by themselves?” The answer to this question is an enthusiastic YES. You can check this post for a brief introduction to the behaviors I’m talking about, but for the full story, you’ll have to keep an eye out for my book.

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For now, I wish you all luck on your journey and hope you have a speedy recovery.