“Anxiety likes a blank canvas…”
By: Jason B. Hobbs Lcsw
Tags: Mental Health, Self, Psychology, Anxiety, Therapy

As a clinician in private practice, one of the phrases that I hear myself repeating often is “Anxiety likes a blank canvas.” This emphasizes several aspects of anxiety:

Anxiety is about a possible future that has not happened yet.

Anxiety explores options, especially dangerous-feeling “what ifs”.

And when there is a lot of blank canvas, there is ample room to paint.

Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash

Anxiety is about a possible future.

The blank canvas is full of possibilities. We can paint happy trees or scary monsters. The future is open to us!

But the physical feelings of anxiety are very present. In this present, you may feel your muscles tighten, your heart rate increase, that “itchiness” in your abdomen, the changes in breathing so that your breath becomes shallow and short instead of long and relaxed. Yet in our minds, our thoughts are generally consumed with the future. As I have noted before, anxiety likes to “time travel” to a possible future.

Because this future is unwritten (or unpainted), our wonderfully imaginative brains can fill in lots of gaps as to what MIGHT happen, eventually creating such a detailed picture that it feels as if this imagined outcome IS actually happening.

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

Remember that your brain is trying to protect you.

We can spend a lot of time being frustrated with an anxious brain, or we can see it for what it is: our armor. Generally, those of us who have more anxiety have had an event (or multiple events) that involved a lower-grade threat to a potentially life-threatening catastrophe. But no matter the intensity or duration of the anxiety-producing event, our present brain wants to make sure that we do not go through that again. So our brain becomes a sort of sentry, a protector, a lookout for danger.

And this is where having a “blank canvas” future is challenging. The anxious “lookout” brain begins to see all sorts of “what ifs” in the blank space of the canvas.

What if I didn’t turn off the oven?

What if that noise is someone in my apartment?

What if my child is still doing this when they are an adult?

What if I lose my job?

Remember that the “what ifs” are about a possible future that has not happened yet, whether that future is something that could happen in the next hour (an anticipated “disastrous” meeting) or in several decades (dying alone).

That future has not happened yet, even though it may feel as if it is. This is just how our brains work.

Photo by Alice Achterhof on Unsplash

So what do we do with a blank canvas? We start to choose how to fill it in instead of letting our “anxious” brain do it for us.

So we pause, take a deep breath, remind ourselves to be in this present moment. Then from that calmer place, we can acknowledge the possible anxiety-producing outcome. Once we have acknowledged it (not fought it) we can look for other possible futures, not only the ones from which our brain is attempting to protect us.

We may paint using reminders about past good outcomes. Remember back to when this scenario went “just OK” or even when everything worked out well!

We may paint with some research that shows us that statistically, our chances of getting attacked by a shark are pretty low. That anxious part of your brain is typically not interested in statistics, but the calmer, more present part of us can better acknowledge what is a real risk and what is not.

We may paint with the colors of our present as a way of filling in the space on the canvas. This way our “protector” doesn’t have room to imagine all the potential nightmares.

Above all, remember to be kind to yourself. That also means being kind to that part of your self that worries. Be gentle with events that have happened in your past. They have shaped you and made you aware of dangers that might happen, that did happen at one time. But then come back to the present, look at that blank canvas, and choose what you paint next.

Hmm, maybe some happy trees?