Over the past few years, I have been struggling with increasingly troublesome phone anxiety. There is a small selection of people who I can call without too much stress (my mom and sister, certain close friends) but all other calls will produce anxiety reactions ranging from mild (heart-fluttering and nervous giggles) to severe (fetal position, crying, major adrenaline rush). The seriousness of the anxiety depends on the importance of the call, how urgent it is, who might be on the other end of the line, whether or not someone is pressuring me to make the call, whether or not I feel “prepared” and any number of irrelevant emotional factors.
When I’ve spoken to other people about this, the reactions I tend to get are either sympathy or near total lack of understanding. A minority of people I’ve talked to have simply not understood why making a phone call could be unnerving for anyone for any reason; they may have been more extroverted than me, I don’t know. Most of the people I’ve talked to about this, however, have either understood or admitted to having phone nerves to some degree also, and have been sympathetic and eager to offer suggestions and advice.
The most common piece of advice I’ve received has been this: try writing out a script to follow. Generally speaking, this is very good advice, and I’m sure it has helped many people. What I noticed today, however, that in trying to follow this advice, I’ve been falling directly into the tar pit in which so much fear tends to breed: anticipation.
I am an imaginative person. When I am afraid of something, I tend to imagine it rather vividly. Those imaginings, those anticipations, rarely have anything to do with reality, but the feelings created by them are real. The more I try to anticipate something which makes me nervous, the more anxious I get. The more anxious I get, the more I try to flee the situation, and the more I try to flee the worse the situation seems to become, which then feeds back into my dire anticipations. This is exactly the cycle I fall into whenever I try to prepare a script for a phone call. In order to write the script, I try to anticipate what the person on the other end might say or ask me, and as soon as I start imagining those possibilities, fear and a self-doubting emotions begin to overwhelm me.
On the other hand, there have been several recent occasions when I simply forced myself to make a call without giving it much, if any, thought beforehand, and as it turned out, they went totally fine. So maybe I was a little awkward, so maybe I could has spoken more concisely, so what? I made the call, I accomplished my aims, and I did not die. I didn’t give myself anything to anticipate, so I didn’t work myself up into a destructive fear cycle, and everything worked out just how it is supposed to. For once in my life, I can actually call my own goram landlord all by myself.
This is so simple, but it is huge for me. I feel like I’ve conquered something, like I’ve cut a head off the hydra and burned the stump so that two heads wont grow back in its place. My self-imposed burdens feel lighter, and I’m one day closer to being able to fly again.
