“Water Balloon” Anxiety

In helping people with anxiety I often hear the same complaint. Once someone identifies the cause of anxiety he gets frustrated that symptoms almost always tend to spill over to other areas of life. This usually leads to a perpetuating increase in anxiety symptoms.

For example, if he’s anxious about his marriage he will be surprised when he finds he now has anxious moments at work, an area of his life he didn’t feel anxious about before.

This is what I call the Water Balloon effect.

Imagine yourself standing in the middle of a parking lot on a hot summer day. You have one water balloon and an impulse to launch it into the sky. As the water balloon hits the pavement most of the water on the pavement is located at the point of impact. But as you move outward from the center the water becomes more sporadic toward the fringe.

This happens with anxiety too. While his marital problems are ground zero, the damaging affect of anxiety isn’t contained. It spreads outward to the fringe, much like the water.

The anxiety at the fringes is often the most troubling for people as it has them believing their entire life has now been taken over by anxiety. Situations and issues they previously had mastery of are now fraught with anxiety. This obviously is not a comforting situation.

This is why I like the Water Balloon analogy, it allows us to understand that much like the water at the fringes of the impact, our fringe anxiety goes away the quickest.

You see, anxiety, both fortunately and unfortunately, is like a switch at its core¹.

Fortunately because you want anxiety to kick in sometimes, such as during moments of survival. If you hear a noise and turn to see a car careening towards you don’t want you brain working at a lackadaisical pace. You need the anxiety switch flipped on and you need it switched on now.

Unfortunately, this is the same way the anxiety switch is flipped in situations where you would much rather keep your anxiety contained to one area of your life and not have it affect any other areas. But again, it doesn’t work like that.

So next time you are dealing with anxiety and it’s spilling in to other areas of your life, take a deep breath and do yourself a favor; understand the fringes will dry the quickest.