This blog post was written by someone who is actively dealing with the daily frustrations of anxiety and perfectionism. The author’s words poignantly capture the difficulty of confronting life’s “what ifs” and “should haves,” especially when it comes to making high-risk decisions. 

We hope this story resonates with you. If you are experiencing feelings similar to the ones described in this piece and are seeking assistance, please don’t hesitate to reach out.

I live in a hurricane and the bunker I made long ago is flooding. I can’t tell you when the storm started or when the leaks began to appear. I can only tell you that I want the storm to stop. 

Unlike the storms that rage along the Eastern coast, this one is all in my head. I have anxiety. My thoughts start to swirl around, faster and faster, until I’m left frozen in the center too dizzy to find a way out.

Most days I find a way back to my bunker of avoidance. If the thoughts of “What if?” and “I should have” become overwhelming, I find a way to distract myself. I’ve developed a particularly cruel talent of burying those thoughts beneath decision-less activities like watching TV, playing video games, or watching cute puppy videos online. The avoidance bunker is my go-to defense mechanism against stress and anxiety. If I have an argument with a friend, I will disappear into the closest book or browse through countless meaningless social media posts. If I get berated for not doing enough or failing at some job or other, I’ll distract myself with a video game where I get all the gold stars for shooting the right zombies. These reactions might serve the purpose of bringing me down from the emotional precipice, but the problems that triggered the avoidance tend to go unsolved and those situations rear up again and again. The storm is still raging and the bunker is still leaking.

It’s common to hear about the fight-or-flight response that humans have developed to respond to stressful situations. What is less talked about is the third response: freeze. For example, if you are at a restaurant and given a menu, every item on the menu represents a choice you have to make. You can have the burger or you can have the fish tacos. You can have water or iced tea. You want dessert afterwards? No problem, which one? You might have to make many choices, but in the end, you get what you came for: food. It seems absurd then that someone who is hungry, at the table, and holding the menu doesn’t order, yet stays. That’s the freeze response. 

When presented with a choice, I can frequently make a decision if I perceive the risks to be low enough. Ordering food at a restaurant feels like a low risk situation, so I don’t experience much stress outside of the initial “What would I like that I can afford?” Afterwards, I tend to focus on the company I’m with and the food I’m eating rather than thoughts of “What if I chose wrong?” 

It’s the higher risk choices that make me freeze. Do I spend the check I got from my car insurance on the hail damage to my car or do I put it towards something else? Do I put the time and effort into going to the gym? Do I go back to school to finish my degree? Do I apply to that higher paying job? Do I go on that date? Do I write this blog about the most fragile part of myself for strangers to read?

The pressure to make a choice, one way or the other, builds up until I feel like a category five storm is threatening to rip off the roof over my head. This is the point where fight, flight, or freeze kicks in. The first two, fight and flight, are decisions. In that case, I either make a choice or remove myself from the situation. In the restaurant scenario, the fight response is to order something and deal with the aftermath, good or bad, as it comes. The flight response is to leave the restaurant. The freeze response, however, leaves you sitting at the table telling the waiter over and over again that you need more time to make a decision. It’s hiding in the bunker ignoring the water seeping into your shoes.

I’m not saying that thinking things through or even delaying a decision is entirely bad. What’s bad about the freeze response is that I tend to stay frozen. I have been meaning to write this blog for weeks, if not months. I have missed deadlines and have made excuse after excuse, but what it comes down to is that I was frozen. It is a cycle that I find myself in. It starts with me knowing that a choice needs to be made, then thinking of all the ways things could go wrong. Or maybe I think about all the ways the situation could go better if I only made a slightly different choice. What if I did x? What if I did y? 

If it stopped at the “what ifs,” I could probably weather the storm better. If I can phrase the “what ifs” so they take on a paranoid, foil-hat-wearing, hermit persona in my head, then they become easier to ignore. It is when “should have” joins the mental conversation that I start to lose the fight. The “what if” is the cautious survivalist inside me that sometimes overreacts. The “should have” is the sadistic bully that likes to rub salt in my wounds. If the choice I made turns out to be wrong, then “I should have done…” starts circling around my head. If I made the right decision, “I should have done…” still shows up to point out how the choice wasn’t perfect. I beat myself up for failing. I beat myself up for not attaining my unachievable expectations. “If” is a horrible word. Hindsight being 20/20, it’s easy to pick out where things went wrong or less than perfect. “Should have” just highlights my failures to the point they become looming thunderclouds inside my head. “Should have” gives the paranoid persona chanting every pessimistic “what if” in my head something new to latch on to. “Should have” creates something worse than just predicting I will die from an undercooked egg at a respectable restaurant. Instead, “should have” causes me to see clouds on the horizon and predict a new wave of failure.

I did not meet the first deadline for this blog, but I “should have.” The deadline gave me plenty of time. I had no restrictions on what to write. There was no dire consequence of missing the deadline. But I didn’t write the blog. I froze. I hid in my bunker and carefully ignored the clock hitting 12:00am the following day. I gave myself the excuse of “I’m already late, I might as well be later.” I then spent the next couple of weeks with “should have” flying around every other thought I had. I still have it pop up.

At some point, I wrote the blog. Obviously, you’re reading it, so it had to have gotten done, but I’ll admit to freezing numerous times throughout the process. The “what ifs” and “should haves” were strong on this one. I’m not going to die from writing and publishing this blog (baring some freak, mystical correlation between you reading this and my continued health). I’m not going to suffer or even lose anything. The worst outcome that I can think of is that nobody connects to what I’m saying and I’m just talking to the blank electronic abyss for free. The risks on this were lower than ordering food at a restaurant, but I feel exhausted. I stepped out of the bunker and the flood threatened to sweep me away.

I can’t say that the hurricane will ever stop entirely or that the bunker will no longer be a siren of blissful avoidance, but I can say that there are ways to quiet the nastier thoughts swirling around. 

I have to remind myself every now and then that action and inaction are both choices. Fight, flight, and freeze might be instinctive reactions, but the choice to remain frozen, to refrain from making a choice, is, in itself, a choice. Freezing and avoiding having to write this blog was a choice. If my hang-up was on making the right choice, I have to admit that making just about any choice other than “I’m not thinking about this right now” would have gotten better results. 

In making choices, I will always have the floating “what if” voice in my head pointing out all the potential scenarios. That’s a critical thought process and is essential to my survival; shutting up that “what if” voice entirely would do me no favors. Instead, I am learning to include the trusting, optimistic voice along with the paranoid conspiracy theorist. Sure, what if nobody connects to what I’m saying? What if they do? What if I wrote thousands of words that end up sounding like an angst-fest? What if there are one or two lines that are worthwhile? What if I spent hours on this blog and it turns out to be crap and not published? What if I spent hours practicing and getting better at writing? What if my thoughts still continue to swirl in my head? What if the storm calms for a bit and I can breathe for a while until the next storm front comes? Optimism towards myself feels like an anathema after years of living with anxiety. 

The “should have” will always be there after a decision. There’s no way of getting rid of it. The only strategy I have found to have any effect on my self-recrimination is acceptance and kindness. I was taught early on to be kind to others. To respect them and their dignity. To acknowledge their right to their own thoughts and their agency over their own body. Somewhere along the way, I forgot to apply that to myself. When the negative, bitter thoughts twist around my head, threatening me in my leaky bunker, I can only drown them out with kindness to myself. I “should have” written this blog long before now, but I’ve gotten it done and it is better than I imagined it could be.