On Trust

Featuring Failure

The tricky thing about anxiety is that it triggers the same mechanism within us that causes us to feel threatened, even when there is nothing occurring in real-time that is putting us at risk. We struggle to discern the difference between the feeling of fear that arises from our thoughts and the fear that we feel when our physical bodies are unsafe. We instinctively trust that we must be anxious for a reason, and our bodies react the way it would, as though we were actually in a dangerous situation. Because we are often not taught how to understand and manage this emotion as kids, we usually become more anxiety-prone over time.

Being anxiety-prone does not mean that we enjoy feeling anxious. Many of us also had experiences that implicitly taught us that our reaction is wrong for the situations that triggered the anxious reaction. But because no one taught us or explained the solution to this problem of feeling anxiety other than to just stop feeling it, we tried to control it in the only way that felt natural at the time; by telling ourselves that we shouldn’t feel it. Unfortunately, this method usually isn’t effective, and as a result what we end up feeling is a combination of frustration and anxiety, instead of only anxiety from that point on.

Frustration results because we assume that we must be weak or lack willpower when we repeatedly fail at changing our anxious reaction to triggering situations. But there are other reasons why we have difficulty staying regulated in the face of anxiety-provoking situations. Keep in mind that even though our present self now believes that we don’t need to feel anxious, our past self spent years believing that we actually did have something to feel anxious about. In order to effectively decrease the feeling of anxiety, we have to figure out what the past beliefs are that conflict with our current understanding of not wanting or needing to feel anxious in similar situations.

One such belief that many of us have, that contributes to the persistence of anxiety is: If we think ahead enough, we will be able to prevent bad outcomes. Our culture believes in the power of planning ahead and attaches a moral good to this behavior. We are told we are smart and proactive when we think ahead of time to identify potential obstacles or barriers to our goals so that our plan succeeds. When we do not have specific plans or goals for our future, we are told implicitly and at times explicitly, that we are lazy and risk failure. Partly out of fear of failing, and because we do feel more in control when we have a plan, many of us unconsciously believe we must always plan and have goals. While planning ahead probably did prove to be effective and did play a role in helping us to succeed academically and professionally, this same belief and behavioral pattern can work against us when it is overused.

The more we buy into the belief that planning ahead is a way to avoid failure, the more time we will spend thinking through the details of our plans, out of a fear that not doing so might cause the very thing we are seeking to avoid. To make matters worse, our failures will almost always stay longer in our memories compared to when we succeeded, because in the past, our physical survival was dependent on remembering the negatives more than the positives. We don’t realize that the emotional feeling of failure in our present day usually does not have any impact on our physical survival. As a result, we learn to conflate failure with a range of emotions that feel uncomfortable and bad to us. Within this framework, failure is the feeling of nervousness that occurs whenever we deal with a new or unexpected situation. We connect failure with the feeling of fear that comes up when any situation feels out of control. Failure becomes a feeling we want to avoid whenever we feel frustrated or ashamed after making a mistake. For some of us, failure can also become conflated with guilt if we believe a bad decision or behavior could leave a permanent stain on ourselves and our family. In this way, even though failure is not actually a specific feeling, we confuse it as one because it is linked with so many different emotions.

We further make failure bigger in our psyche, every time we think about it. By setting the avoidance of failure as an end goal and emotion, we inadvertently spend more time thinking about failing and remembering what that felt like, or could feel like, than succeeding. Those of us who spend a lot of time making plans due to this fear also tend to have less real-life experiences of what it feels like to come back from failure. This sustains the fear of failure and the belief that we will be devastated if we were to experience it. But present day experiences are crucial to our learning. When we do everything in our power to avoid experiencing failure, we do not give ourselves opportunities to learn that we have the ability to handle it when it happens. Then when we do experience it unexpectedly, failure becomes exponentially more difficult to handle, and we believe we have to continue to plan to avoid failing at all costs, because the experience truly felt awful. What we don’t realize is that failing felt worse because the time, energy, and effort we put into making these plans made us more invested in wanting it to work out. Consequently, when the plan fails, we are not only feeling the impact of the failure, but also frustration because it feels like the time and energy we spent went to waste.

Understanding that we will not be devastated by failure if we were to experience it, is the key to decreasing our fear around it. One of the ways to do this, is to distinguish between lack of experience and lack of ability. One of the ironies around fear is that once we feel it in a certain situation, we do our best to avoid future situations that trigger similar types of fear. When this happens, we decrease the likelihood of feeling the anxiety which helps us to feel strong, but we also decrease the chances of proving to ourselves that we can handle that situation if we were to experience it again, which results in an increase in fear. The fear in our minds regarding that situation grows because we do not have enough real-life experiences where we feel like we successfully managed that triggering situation. Discerning the difference between lack of ability and lack of experience, and realizing that they do not mean the same thing, becomes the first step to improving trust in our ability to handle all parts of life, and learn to fully live it.

Failing is a natural part of life. We might believe that avoiding the bad parts of life is the smart or even right thing to do, but in the process, what we do instead is make ourselves believe that we are more fragile than we are. No matter how much we try to control failure, we are going to experience it at some point because there is no way to completely avoid these types of experiences. This doesn’t mean that we need to enjoy or like failing. But if we really accept that failing in the ways that were described earlier is a normal part of life, we learn to see and feel for ourselves that the experience doesn’t actually cause us long-lasting harm. In doing so, we discover that we can handle difficult emotions and experiences, and that we might be tougher than we believed. Through regaining this trust in ourselves, we give ourselves the opportunity to finally live our lives in the ways that we might want.