The Real Reason You Feel Anxious, and It’s Not What You Think
The Emotional Regulation Coach regulates your nervous system, co-regulates with your kids, and feels safe at all times, even when the people around you are dysregulated.
Ready for a different way to relate to anxiety? Most people try to solve anxiety by changing circumstances or other people. But what if the real issue isn’t what’s happening around you, it’s what you’re taking responsibility for? In this article, I’ll walk you through a simple but powerful shift that helped me move from anxious and reactive to grounded and at peace.
The moment I realized what was actually happening
I remember when I first realized that I had been taking responsibility for other people’s emotions. I was working for a tech company, and the head of my department was questioning my team’s priorities. All of a sudden, I felt anxious.
At the time, I didn’t know why. So, after the call, I took a moment to pull out my journal and do a thought download. A thought download is a tool I use to externalize my thinking so I can observe it and understand the thoughts that are causing my emotions. Practically, you just write down whatever is in your head at the time, then give yourself a few minutes to read back through what you wrote so you can understand yourself better. I usually time-box it to 5–10 minutes.
Through downloading my thoughts into my journal and sitting with them for a few minutes afterward, I realized that I was taking responsibility for the head of my department’s emotions.
How anxiety gets created
You see, I felt great about my team’s priorities. In fact, I knew that if we didn’t have those priorities, we’d have a bunch of fires to put out every week, that’s how fragile the system was at the time. But the head of my department disagreed with me. He did not think I was prioritizing the right things. He wanted me to prioritize building new things, and I could feel his disappointment when he spoke. And just like that, without a conscious thought on my part, his disappointment became my responsibility to fix.
Why? Because that was the only way I knew how to deal with my anxiety, accommodate the other person. Find a way to make them pleased with me again so that I didn’t have to feel anxious anymore. I felt this pull to find a way to make him agree with my team’s priorities, or agree with his priorities for my team (even though I knew they were wrong), just so I could stop feeling anxious.
There is another way
This was before I knew how to drop into my body and feel my emotions, thereby regulating my nervous system so I could stop feeling anxious. Changing someone else’s mind or lying to myself to please someone else is no longer required. Last week, my wife Abby and I had a scheduling disagreement, and the conversation ended with Abby asking if we could go to bed and talk about it another time. I immediately wanted to take responsibility for her emotions. I could tell she disagreed with me, and she didn’t want to debate the issue anymore. That night, I could feel the pull to just agree with her and make it all better again, to feel connected instead of the disconnection I felt. It didn’t take long for me to realize that I was taking responsibility for her emotions. So, I literally said to myself, “It’s okay to disagree with someone you love. In fact, it’s healthy. You don’t have to agree with Abby to love her well. You can love her well by making space for her opinion to be different from yours.” Through that pause and thought exercise, I was able to give her emotions back to her and take responsibility instead for what I was feeling.
What I do now
Today, when I have these same experiences and feel the pull to take responsibility for someone’s emotions, I pause and clean up my thoughts. I intentionally think thoughts that have me taking responsibility for my emotions, and not taking responsibility for anyone else’s.
Bottom line
You are not responsible for other people’s emotions. You are only responsible for your own. When you can pause and clean up your emotional responsibility, you’ll feel more at peace and less anxious. Because your emotions are fully within your control, other people’s emotions are not. Taking responsibility for other people’s emotions creates anxiety for you (because being responsible for something you don’t control creates anxiety for anyone). And it creates relational tension with the other person, because in order for you to feel better, you must try to change their emotions.
So the next time you feel anxious, ask yourself, "Whose emotions am I taking responsibility for?" The answer will be clarifying.
Ready to go deeper?
Regulating your nervous system, by taking responsibility only for your emotions and processing them in your body, is my area of expertise, and I’d love to support you when you’re ready. If you’ve noticed anxiety is part of your life and you want to feel less anxious, more at peace, and more regulated, I can help.
Get started and learn more here.
Read more from Coleman Housefield
Coleman Housefield, Emotional Regulation Coach
Coleman Housefield has spent 20 years coaching and mentoring men and women through the hardest seasons of their lives, but he didn't start this work because he had it all figured out. He began because his own emotions were running his life, and he didn't know how to stop it. Coleman would get dysregulated by his kids, work stress, and things that shouldn't have been a big deal, with no idea how to handle it. Driven by the need for change, he went deep into studying how our nervous systems work, training with the best to build a method that actually works, not just in theory, but in real life with real people who have jobs, families, and little time for fluff. Now, he helps others do what he had to learn the hard way.
