I See It in My Clients: Anxiety, Depression, and Staying With Discomfort
I have some terrible news…. It turns out that exercise is indeed good for you. I know, I’m sorry. Just another mental health professional confirming what you already know - and what I’ve learned about anxiety, depression, and staying with discomfort.
I hate to be redundant, but exercise, specifically running, has taught me more about myself, the blind spots, and my relationship to discomfort than I could have ever anticipated.
You could say that I am a runner or at the very least have experience with running. I did cross country in high school and would occasionally run here and there throughout the years. As I am writing this, I am about 10 weeks out from the OC Marathon. I had always said that I would never do a marathon and I meant it when I said it. I mean it’s actually crazy. Who pays money to voluntarily run 26.2 miles, but as I have been getting closer and closer to race day, the marathon isn’t the crazy part, it’s the training.
Every Friday I wake up early and mentally prepare for the dreaded long run. If you’re unfamiliar with long distance running, once a week you have a long run as part of your training program. The closer you get to race day, the mileage gradually increases week by week. This week I have 15 miles, next week I have 16 miles, peaking at 21 miles. Every Friday… double digit runs - week in and week out.
There are quite a few people in my life who have zero interest in ever running long distances, so I totally understand the disconnect and immediate repulsion that comes with the thought of running 19 miles in one day, but if you’d humor me and imagine the feelings that might come with the thought of even being tasked with something like that. It is daunting. There is some dread, a feeling of impossibility, an immediate aversion to exerting effort, and a temptation to try to avoid difficulty at all cost. This is the same kind of emotional avoidance I often see in therapy. And that doesn’t even cover the feelings that come when you’re actually running.
There is something about running that is so hard to put into words. It does something to your soul. The repetition, the cadence of hearing yourself take one step after another. It is steadying somehow and it honestly feels difficult to convey to others because it’s an experience. And if you know me or have ever sat in a session with me, I’m all about - what I call a “felt experience.” I can tell you doing hard things is important. I can try to convey that it’s meaningful to practice courage and to face discomfort squarely and head on and know what it feels like to defeat it, but until you’ve experienced it and chosen it for yourself, it’s technically just a concept. In therapy, this is often the work: learning how to stay with hard feelings instead of escaping them.
I get the sense that people who don’t run think that it’s easy to run long distances. It comes and goes in a passing report like, “I ran 14 miles today,” or in the flash of an Instagram story. Sure, there is runner’s high. There is love for a sport and enjoyment in the process, but it is by no means easy.
I don’t even love running LOL. I like it. I think it’s important. I think it’s done something to me and for me. But more than anything else, it challenges these blind spots in me.
Learning to Stay With Hard Feelings
They say in therapy school that you can only take your clients as far as you’ve gone. And I think this is true to some degree. I know what despair feels like. I know what it’s like to have a pit in your stomach and unresolved family conflict eat away at your soul. I know what it feels like to spin around to try to fix yourself or to resolve something in your life, but not know how to. And most important, I know what it feels like to want happiness and stability more than anything else in the world. I just want to be okay.
And don’t you want that too? The more that I practice therapy, the more I notice these trends in human behavior. I see it with anxious clients. I see it with depressed clients. I see it with stuck clients. I see it in myself. Oh shit, do I see it in myself.
My clients try so hard to get away from pain and discomfort because they think that finding stability means getting rid of those things, instead of walking toward the pit and jumping in. They run away, too fearful, that the storm will swallow them alive. And maybe it will. Maybe it will be intolerable, maybe it will feel like dying, but I firmly believe that nothing can last forever. And walking toward it is better than never moving at all. Part of healing is actually about distress tolerance. It’s about learning how to stay with a feeling instead of running from it.
Part of why I run is to simulate all of those feelings because I feel them too. I am scared. I am fearful. I am daunted by life. I have a propensity to worry and feel sadness in my soul. The ritual of running is to once again be face to face with discomfort and pain and allow myself to tolerate it - to practice distress tolerance in real time.. To know that I can do hard things. To feel my agency and discipline as the ground underneath me and to experience what it’s like for it to carry me somewhere. I start at mile 1 and bit by bit, I find myself somewhere else; mile 3 or maybe 8 or hopefully halfway or perhaps with 2 miles left with the end of the suffering just on the horizon. All along the way it’s a fight, but that’s the point of it all. It isn’t to stop the feeling, to end the suffering, to feel the relief that it’s over. It’s to find how to be okay that it's there.
I have an old colleague who would come into the break room every couple months and tell me about what her “new thing.” One week she would tell me that she realized that she felt religion was important and that she was indeed a Christian. The next she would try to sell me on a new author or school of thought. And much like her, this is my new thing, but my point isn’t to sell you on long distance running. It isn’t to try to get you to run 10 miles and see what it feels like. It’s to tell you that part of life is suffering. It’s pain. It’s fear. It’s dread. It’s not knowing if you’ll get the things you want in life. But the way out is not to run away; it’s to lean in. I say that the best kind of suffering is the kind that you know doesn’t last forever. And I’m here to tell you that 19 miles feels like forever, but much like running, you face the monster and at some point, the suffering ends. Perhaps the same is true for you. Maybe the point isn’t to try to get rid of all of those feelings - the loneliness, the fear, the uncertainty. Maybe it’s to be able to hold it all. The joy, the discipline, the suffering, the whole lot. One step at a time, one long run at a time, one marathon at a time.