What a Roller Coaster Taught Me About Anxiety
I have a sticker that reads, “THE FUTURE WILL NOT BE A DISASTER. You just have anxiety, sorry.” I originally picked it out for myself from a pile of stickers that an instructor was handing out during training back when I was an on-site therapist at a public high school in San Francisco well over a year ago. When I got home, I put it in one of those “I don’t know where to put this but I don’t want to lose it so I’ll put it here” places, then promptly forgot it existed. Fast forward to a few months ago when I was having an annual bout of “AHHHHH,” I was doing a little spring cleaning (a great way to use up excess anxious energy) and happened upon this sticker. I cried and marveled at how past me knew I would need this reminder.
The sticker no longer resides in one of my “I don’t know where to put this but I don’t want to lose it so I’ll put it here” places. Now it’s on my laptop, where it lives directly under my right wrist.
The future will not be a disaster.*
*Note: this is not to say that disasters don’t happen. This is not to say that genocide and war and terrible traumas don’t exist. But most of us are not facing those issues personally and likely will not in the future. (And this blog is really not meant for folks in those situations.)
The first time I rode a giga coaster
When I was in high school, I lived about a 90-minute drive from Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio. I was not what you might call a thrill-seeker (this fact has not changed decades later either). I didn’t really feel the same pleasurable feelings friends got when something scary-to-me was happening, whether it was skiing down a black diamond slope, watching horror movies on Halloween, or… roller coasters. But it was high school, and I pushed myself to do those things anyway because a) I thought it was my job to push myself and b) I liked having some sort of a social life. So of course I found myself at Cedar Point a few times each summer.
There were some favorite coasters (even for me), of course. To this day I still love the Raptor, and the Gemini is just pure dual coaster-racing joy. And even the Magnum (at the time the tallest coaster there) was pretty cool. But then, just when I was adjusting to coaster life, something new was introduced… The Millennium Force. The highest, steepest, we-built-lockers-cause-you-can’t-have-anything-in-your-pockets damn rollercoaster any of us had ever seen. According to the website, Millennium Force was the first-ever giga-coaster. And my friends wanted to try it.
I, for one, did not want to stand around by myself for hours while they stood in line. (Kids, this is before there was any sort of fast-pass skip-the-line type system out there.) So I, too, got in line. And waited. Anxiety building. Terror rising. Until we reached the top of the stairs to the loading area. From there I saw that there was—indeed—no way to chicken out from up here, and as I realized the track out of the loading building looked like it was going straight up, things shifted into more of a panic. And yet I got on the ride. The seat restraints came down over our heads and we were off… to experience the first coaster ever to have a drop of 300 feet at an 80-degree angle. WHAT THE FUCK?!?
The chain-powered ride to the top takes forever. We just kept getting higher… and higher… and higher, and—oh! the views of Lake Erie are lovely! Look at all the tiny ant-sized people around the park! Wait we’re still not at the top? Oh god, we’re high up!—then we began to crest the hill. The reality of the situation started to come into focus and my body was positively buzzing with anxiety. I braced for impact, tensing every muscle fiber of my being as we began racing down the hill.
We were weightless, going seemingly straight down, and I was trying so hard to protect myself. And then something strange happened. I simply let go. (Not with my hands… are you insane?) I let go of all of the tension in my body. I stopped bracing for impact. My belly expanded. And you know what happened? I SOARED. It was exhilarating!
I learned something really important that day about riding roller coasters. The more you brace, the worse you feel. Riding a roller coaster tensed feels scarier rather than simply succumbing to the experience.
Bracing for impact
(You probably know where I’m going with this, but it took me over two decades to connect the dots.)
Sometimes in life, we brace so hard for something unwanted or scary to happen that we make our experience way scarier and harder than the thing we feared actually is. Not just because of the mental load that comes with active anxiety (and boy can it feel exhausting), but also because of the literal physical impact of all of that bracing. When we tense up proactively to protect ourselves (in non-life-threatening circumstances), we are telling our brains to expect the worst and the entire experience becomes worse. Not to mention we then walk around with really tight necks and shoulders or your anxious body-part-of-choice and therefore get injured more easily.
I actively use this metaphor in my life and talk about it in my personal therapy. Oh gosh, I’m bracing again. Let’s see what it feels like to let go instead. It invariably goes better for me when I let go and simply experience the ride. (It also takes practice. Like everything in life worth doing.)
The future will not be a disaster. And even if the future doesn’t hold what you want, it will go better and feel easier to you if you can just let go and ride the ride.
A parting gift for making it to the end.
Me, circa 2001, surviving the Millennium Force.
If you’re in California and in search of a therapist to help you stop bracing for impact in your own life, I’m currently accepting new clients. Reach out—let’s chat.
