Anxiety it says is a call to pay attention to something I am ignoring. Not sure how because anxiety on the other hand makes me focus on something too closely and maybe instead I should step back and say F** it instead?
We might say that anxiety is saying "you should mitigate this threat or fix this problem" or "you should mitigate this threat now! you should fix this problem now!".
A challenge is that we don't know how to mitigate every threat or fix every problem, and we may never be able to do so in our current situations or in our whole lives.
So there can be an additional challenge of saying "yep, I got the message, and unfortunately I've actually done what I can about this issue at this time!". (And maybe, if I remember correctly what I thought I understood from the SF Zen Center's anxiety class, "I appreciate that I'm a person who cares about mitigating this threat or fixing this problem; it's great that I can see the value and urgency of this".)
We might say that, evolutionarily, acute anxiety, like acute physical pain from an injury, is hard to turn off merely by saying that we've gotten the message. Anxiety and pain serve as reminders of some of the most urgent problems we face, where procrastination could be very detrimental. But sometimes we need to find a way to say WONTFIX.
Anxiety typically motivates some form of avoidance, as it is an attempt to keep ourselves safe. Every time we give in to anxiety and avoid a thing, it reinforces our anxious respons, so we become more and more avoidant of the thing we are anxious about over time.
The solution typically suggested is to realistically consider the actual consequences of the worst-case scenario and sit with that until it stops being overwhelming. Then we can consider what we could do to mitigate that actual realistic worst-case possibility, and then after figuring out what it would take we get to decide if we want to put in all the effort to take those precautions or if actually it's fine, we can just do the thing despite our anxiety yelling at us. And when we do the thing and nothing bad happens, our body has a chance to learn that it is actually safe after all and it doesn't need to freak out trying to protect us.
If instead we avoid the thing, that makes us more anxious in the future. And if we try to skip examining our fears and just muscle through, we'll end up associating doing the thing with feeling strung out on adrenaline, which also isn't great.
A challenge is that we don't know how to mitigate every threat or fix every problem, and we may never be able to do so in our current situations or in our whole lives.
So there can be an additional challenge of saying "yep, I got the message, and unfortunately I've actually done what I can about this issue at this time!". (And maybe, if I remember correctly what I thought I understood from the SF Zen Center's anxiety class, "I appreciate that I'm a person who cares about mitigating this threat or fixing this problem; it's great that I can see the value and urgency of this".)
We might say that, evolutionarily, acute anxiety, like acute physical pain from an injury, is hard to turn off merely by saying that we've gotten the message. Anxiety and pain serve as reminders of some of the most urgent problems we face, where procrastination could be very detrimental. But sometimes we need to find a way to say WONTFIX.