Why Workbooks for Anxiety Are Not Enough
You probably know as well as I do: there are a million workbooks out there for every topic imaginable, including a ton for mental health struggles of all kinds. And since there is an increasing awareness of all of the different types of anxiety (hooray for awareness!) and the many ways it can plague our lives, workbooks designed to help people with anxiety rank at the very top. But are they enough?
The answer is a complicated “It depends what you are looking for”.
Here’s a quick run down of ways they can be helpful:
They can provide quick explanations of ideas and concepts, hopefully in a way that is easily understood by the reader.
They can provide thought-provoking questions or prompts to help you dig a little deeper into understanding yourself.
They can provide strategies to try to reduce symptoms and encourage different mindsets.
But here’s the tough-love truth: if you want to truly heal, the workbooks for anxiety alone are probably not enough.
Don’t get me wrong, workbooks can absolutely be helpful. But the reason that they are often not enough to truly heal anxiety is this: While they might help you get a clearer picure of the root cause of anxiety and even some strategies to deal with it, learning about anxiety is very different than healing it.
The deepest healing comes not just from using strategies—even really great ones that are designed to help your nervous system come into balance—but when you have corrective experiences with a safe human. The root cause of anxiety often boils down to beliefs about yourself that you picked up earlier in life. These beliefs might sound like “I am not good enough”, “I am not safe”, “I am not wanted”, or “I am alone”; these beliefs often stem from experiences you had with other people when you were very young. Sometimes these experiences are glaringly obvious to you: Overt abuse, neglect, or trauma can disrupt a child’s view of themselves and the world around them. But even in the absence of these obvious disruptions, even more subtle events or dynamics between family members can create these anxious beliefs…and because they are more subtle, they are often harder to spot as the cause of limiting beliefs, and therefore often go untreated.
If these beliefs were caused by experiences with other people, then the most effective antidote involves corrective experiences with safe people. If you relied only on the insight and strategies that a workbook provides, you’d run the risk of the information making sense only in the logical part of your brain; The deep-down healing of beliefs doesn’t happen when you are in your logical brain—it happens when you are in the midst of something triggering (and responding from more emotional parts of your brain) and met with a supportive response.
Here is an example: Let’s say you experience anxiety when you have to do a presentation at a work meeting. This type of anxiety has been with you since elementary school and the terrifying experience of having to read in front of the class. A workbook might help you understand what is happening in your brain and may provide you some strategies to prepare to use before your work presentation, as well as strategies to use when you are in the meeting. These tips might work really well for your meeting…but a week later you realize you have similar anxiety while waiting at your kids’ bus stop and you notice “the cool moms” looking in your direction. Different scenario, same anxiety.
To really help this anxiety heal, you first need to identify the deep-down unhelpful belief: “If people judge me negatively, it means I am unsafe/or it means something is wrong with me.” You might benefit from tracing this back to elementary school when you were reading in front of the class and messed up a word—and the horror of having everyone in the class laughing at you. You might even be able to look back further to a memory of “saying the wrong thing” and your parent scowling at you as they correct you, and how small and unwanted that made you feel. These scenarios can certainly affect how you feel about yourself; even though these situations are not physically dangerous, as humans we are wired for connection with others and, especially when we are children, we need the connection with others to literally survive. Fear of judgment from others makes sense, because if we are not accepted, we don’t have access to what we need in order to survive. Even though as adults you don’t need others in the same way to survive, when anxiety and self-doubt are kicking in, it’s because you’re operating from this belief from childhood that hasn’t evolved. They key to helping this belief evolve is new experiences.
By using a workbook, you might discover the origins of your anxiety and the strategies to help you get through a tough present-day moment. These can absolutely be helpful, but are limited when they don’t translate into other situations. The crucial part that is missing is the rewiring of the deep-down belief.
Let me describe the difference. Imagine being with a compassionate therapist who you have developed a positive connection. Imagine standing up in front of her (because this activates something in you that says “I am being more closely evaluated”) and giving the same work presentation. The anxiety can start ramping up at the thought of screwing up and looking stupid, even though you like your therapist. When you flub a word the negative spiral really kicks in— your mind starts saying all kinds of critical and fearful things like “You screwed up again—of course you did. Now she’s judging you, and knows how incompetent you really are. Whelp, now this relationship is ruined…just like all of the others.”
Now imagine your therapist looking you in the eye with a kind and gentle smile on her face and saying “Hey, you’re allowed to flub your words with me.” The energy she shares feels accepting and supportive.
Suddenly, you break down crying. All of the past experiences of others not accepting you comes rushing to the surface to release through your tears. And instead of being met with “Oh, don’t cry! It’ll all be ok!” or something much worse like “I can’t believe you are crying—you’re too senstive!”, you are met with a more compassionate response of “You have so much grief right now, it’s ok to let it be here. I am right here with you.” This experience may be unlike anything you have encountered in your life before; it often can bring a mix of “this feels really good” with “this is really foreign and I don’t know how to trust it”. When we are met with compassion and understanding in our most vulnerable moments, our nervous system starts to rewrite the belief that our authentic self is welcome by others.
If the old beliefs were shaped by unpleasant reactions from other people making you believe you were unwanted, unsafe, or not-good-enough, then supportive reactions from other people encourage the rewriting of those beliefs. The more experiences you have like this, the more the new belief solidifies. The more it solidifies, the more you will respond from a grounded place in the face of stressors like presenting at work meetings or standing with the moms at the bus stop—and when you are unexpectedly confronted by your mother-in-law and need to set a boundary. You’re not just executing a series of steps you learned, you’re interpretting the situations through a more grounded lens. Instead of thinking “Uh-oh, they are judging me and I have to try and prevent that—bad things can happen if they judge me!”, your new solidified belief says “They are allowed to judge me if they want, I can’t prevent that and I don’t need to try. I am safe and ok even if they judge me.”
You see, it’s not about using the right strategy in the right moment all of the time. It is about operating from a new belief about yourself that allows you to respond to any situation from a place of worth.
So use the workbook for anxiety in the way it can be helpful to you (some insight and some strategies), but don’t stop there. Meet with an anxiety therapist to help heal the deep-down stuff—the stuff that only heals with safe connection with others—to really move through life with confidence and trust in yourself.
