Why anxiety makes you feel like you’re not doing enough

Anxiety hates space.

It looks to fill every space with words, thoughts, and reactions.

It looks for what’s wrong, so that it can fix it.

It looks for uncertainty, so that it can attempt to create certainty.

But certainty does not exist outside of us.

So anything we DO only creates more uncertainty. More holes to patch. More gaps to fill.

The only way to counteract this is to trust.

And this is the hard part for a lot of us. Because maybe our experience has taught us that trust equals hurt. Trust equals betrayal. Trust equals deceit, disbelief, and more pain.

If we place all our trust in something or someone, we are asking ourselves to surrender to things completely outside our control. And if that blows up in our face, the hurt on top of the betrayal is how we berate ourselves for “falling for it.”

But love cannot exist without grief. Witnessing our own loss is what gives us power, if we allow it to move, rather than become stagnant in our lives. It teaches us to be wiser. And beyond that, it gives us the opportunity to forgive ourselves. To accept our own limitations at that moment. And to welcome the lesson and growth that came from it.

This is where the choice is.

Trust is not about blindly putting our trust in everything outside ourselves. It’s leading ourselves with faith in our own strength to persevere, no matter the outcome.

When we live with this intention, time slows. We are not looking for the next thing, achievement, or person to validate us. We are living in accordance with our own belief that our existence has value. That we were put here to improve the lives of all other living things, simply by existing.

And when we are open to accepting this truth, how can we be close to anxiety? How can we be far from trust?

There is a knowing in you that will give you so much more than any amount of thinking can ever do.

Get still enough to hear it.

Have the courage to live in space. In the in-between. In voids that don’t need to be filled, because they are already whole.

Because you are already whole.

And if that’s a statement that seems hard to access right now, that’s okay. Trust that you will see the answer when you allow yourself to look. Trust that you will hear it when you allow yourself to listen.

Trust that in every moment, even if there’s work that can be done, you have already arrived.