The Great Slowdown

Anxiety has been my lifelong companion, sometimes wise and sometimes misleading. Learning to tell the difference has become one of the most important parts of staying healthy. This reflection is about how slowing down helps me find the truth beneath the noise.

Through my writing, you have come to know me as someone recovering from anorexia. But I am recovering from much more than anorexia: I am recovering from people pleasing, from pushing down my feelings, from hiding from myself. Put all of these together, and you can see that I live in a body full of anxiety. While that anxiety has taken many shapes over the course of my life, she has been, and continues to be, a steady companion. Honestly, I would not know who I am without her, and I trust she will keep me company until the end.

Interestingly, while I carry deep shame about the years I have struggled with anorexia, I do not feel ashamed of my anxiety. Unless we are broken in some fundamental way, all of us carry anxiety. One of the most useful things I learned in graduate school was the Yerkes-Dodson law. It is one of those psychological principles that state the obvious but still manages to explain so much. At its core, the idea is that a small amount of anxiety or stress helps us perform better, but too much shuts us down. Picture an inverted “U” on a graph. As our anxiety begins to rise, so does our focus and motivation. But once the pressure tips into overwhelm, we start to unravel. All of this is to say that we all benefit from some anxiety; we just need to notice when it begins to get in our way.

Most of my patients struggle with some form of anxiety. Early on, I tell them that my job is not to help them get rid of it. This often comes as a surprise. I explain that I do not have the ability to rid anyone of difficult feelings. What I can do is help them learn to sit with their anxiety, to listen to it, and to discern when it is trying to protect them and when it is leading them astray.

This is not just a professional stance. It is how I live each day. When I was a little girl full of fears, I developed an almost crippling fear of flying. Ironic, I know. The fear showed up long before the plane crash that later rocked my family and stole five people we loved. I was nine when a Northwest flight out of Detroit crashed, leaving all dead but one four-year-old girl. She walked out of the wreckage having lost her mother, father, and brother. I do not remember how I learned about the crash, probably an article in People magazine, but I remember identifying with that little girl. Over and over, I imagined what it would be like to be her, to feel that terror, to live with that loss. From that point on, I never boarded a plane without dread filling my body.

But here is the thing I remind myself that helps me each time I step onto an airplane, certain that this will be the flight that does not land: anxiety does not always tell the truth. My body believes I am unsafe, yet every safe landing proves otherwise. The truth of our safety is not always evident, and it is easy to let anxiety convince us otherwise.

Anxiety urges movement. It makes us feel we must act fast to avoid danger. Sometimes that is true, especially when the threat, physical or emotional, is real. But often the threat is not real, and the work is learning to tell the difference.

The only way I have learned to do that is by slowing down. This is deeply unnatural when anxiety is surging, but over time I have realized that the best first step is stillness. I do not mean to preach; I am as much a student of this as anyone. Knowing I benefit from moving slowly is different from doing it. Slowing down is not an endpoint. It is a practice, one that loops and circles back again and again.

Most recently, I have been reminded of this through an ongoing Marco Polo conversation with a friend I have had a complicated history with. For anyone unfamiliar, Marco Polo is an app that lets you record short videos for someone to watch when they can. It is not a real-time exchange, which means there is no pressure to respond immediately. You listen. You take it in. And only then do you reply. It creates a natural pause, one that slows everything down.

That pause has changed our friendship. We have so much in common, but we also differ on some major issues that have divided much of the world. Enough that I have taken breaks in our friendship when our differences felt too heavy to hold. Where I once lost sight of the love underneath, I am now finding it again. I am talking about hard things in a new way, slowing down before I respond. In that space of slowness, we are both learning to hold what connects us while naming what divides us.

I remember a phrase I first heard on an externship in graduate school: strike while the iron is cold. The older I get, the more it feels true, and the more I see that it is just another way of saying slow down before you respond. That simple phrase runs against everything anxiety tells us. Anxiety says act now, strike while the iron is hot, fix it fast, fill the silence. Slowing down gives us room to think, to listen, and to respond with care instead of panic.

It occurs to me that moving slowly might just be what well-being is all about. Not erasing anxiety or running from conflict, but learning to stay with ourselves in the middle of it. Slowing down long enough to see what is real and what is fear.

So that is what I am trying to practice these days: slowing down when my instinct is to rush, breathing when my body says to brace, and letting truth, not urgency, lead the way.

Because sometimes the best thing we can do is nothing at all. At least, to start.

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