Sometimes you can explain anxiety to somebody until you're blue in the face and nothing really changes.
Then you give them a picture. A taxi pulling up beside them. A snow globe being shaken. A radio playing loudly in the background.
And suddenly they see something.
This is one of the reasons I use metaphors for anxiety and overthinking so much in my work. They're not just a nice way of making something complicated sound simpler. A good metaphor can help us step away from everything we already believe about our own experience for a moment and look at it differently.
And sometimes that's where the insight happens.
Why metaphors can help us understand anxiety
We were talking about this recently on a call and somebody asked me why stories and metaphors seem to help people become curious about something without feeling challenged by it.
I loved the question because that's exactly what I see happen.
We're all so different in our experience. I could sit here and tell you exactly what anxiety looked like for me, what I thought, what I felt and what changed, and you could quite reasonably think, Well, that's not how it is for me.
Because it won't be.
Your experience is yours.
But when I offer you a metaphor, something slightly different can happen. We step away from comparing my experience with yours and there's a bit more room to explore.
It's less about me saying, "This is how it is."
It's more like, "Have you ever considered looking at it like this?"
You get to see what you see.
That's quite important to me because I don't want somebody learning a new set of rules about how they're supposed to think. I've done enough of that myself over the years, trying to get everything right and wondering what I was doing wrong when I couldn't.
Understanding doesn't really work like that.
Think about anxiety like a snow globe
One of the metaphors I've used for years is a snow globe.
Imagine you've got one in your hands and you've shaken it really hard. You can barely see through it because there's stuff flying everywhere.
Now imagine deciding that you need to get rid of every single bit of snow before you can feel okay.
So you shake it again.
You turn it upside down. Have a proper look at it. Give it another shake because perhaps this time you'll somehow get everything where you want it.
Obviously, the snow isn't going anywhere.
The more you interfere with it, the longer it stays cloudy.
Yet if you put the snow globe down for a bit, something happens without you having to organise a single flake. Everything begins to settle by itself.
I've seen myself doing the mental equivalent of shaking that snow globe thousands of times.
Why am I feeling like this?
What was I thinking about before this started?
How do I make it stop?
What if I still feel like this tomorrow?
It always looked as though I was trying to find clarity, but sometimes all that analysing was simply adding more movement to an already busy mind.
Seeing that was much more useful to me than being given another thing to do.
Anxiety metaphors aren't instructions
This is the bit I find really interesting.
I can share exactly the same metaphor with several people and they'll take completely different things from it.
One person hears the snow globe metaphor and suddenly sees how much they're analysing their anxiety.
Somebody else notices how frightened they've become of having a busy mind in the first place.
Another person might simply see that settling is something the mind already knows how to do.
Nobody has got the metaphor "right".
That's the beauty of it.
If I give you a strategy with several steps to follow, it's very easy for your thinking to turn it into another test. Am I doing it properly? How often should I do it? How long before it works? Why is everybody else getting this and I'm not?
Before long, the thing that was meant to help can become something else to monitor.
A metaphor leaves more room.
There's nothing to pass.
Metaphors for overthinking can show us something words don't
Overthinking is a particularly good example of this because when we're caught up in our thinking, the obvious solution can look like... more thinking.
We try to think our way out of thought.
I did this for years.
I thought if I could understand every feeling, trace every anxious thought back to where it came from, work out whether something was a real concern or anxiety, and finally get enough certainty, I'd feel safe.
It kept me incredibly busy.
What I hadn't understood was how naturally thought moves when we're not holding onto it, analysing it or repeatedly bringing it back to life.
I often use the metaphor of taxis for this.
Thoughts are like taxis pulling up beside us. You don't control which ones appear, but you don't have to get into every one.
Some thoughts come and go almost unnoticed.
Then one arrives saying, What if something is wrong?
We're in that taxi before we've even realised we've opened the door.
We start following the thought, analysing it and searching for certainty. Before we know it, we're miles away from where we started.
Understanding that thought is naturally transient changed far more for me than trying to make sure the "wrong" taxis stopped turning up.
Why Do I Take My Thoughts So Seriously? Understanding Anxious and Overthinking Thoughts
The metaphor isn't supposed to fix your anxiety
This matters.
When I share an anxiety metaphor, I'm not giving you a technique to use the next time you feel anxious.
You don't need to sit there thinking, Quick, I'm anxious. Where's my snow globe?
That would slightly miss the point.
The metaphor is there to point towards an understanding.
The Unrestricted Model® is built around this same idea. I'm much more interested in helping people understand how thought, fear and human experience work than giving them another collection of techniques for controlling themselves.
Because when we see something differently, our experience can begin to change naturally.
We don't have to force an insight.
Sometimes a metaphor lands immediately. Sometimes it doesn't particularly mean anything to you at all. Then another one comes along and you suddenly see something you've been looking at for years in a completely different way.
I love that.
You don't need every metaphor to mean something to you
I think we've become so used to consuming information that we can approach understanding in the same way.
We want to remember everything. Highlight everything. Take notes. Make sure we've got the important bit.
Then we try to apply it.
With this kind of work, I'm far less interested in how much information somebody can remember afterwards.
I'm interested in what they saw for themselves.
That's why metaphors can be so powerful. They leave some room for you in the conversation.
Your own experience. Your own insight. Your own imagination.
The metaphor isn't the answer.
It's pointing at something and inviting you to have a look.
One metaphor a day. See what you see.
I love metaphors so much that, years ago, I apparently created an entire collection of them and then completely forgot I'd done it.
Which, if you know me, probably won't surprise you.
A Metaphor a Day brings together 30 different metaphors exploring thought, fear, anxiety, overthinking and what it means to be human.
There's no homework and nothing you need to master. Take one metaphor each day, have a read and see what it brings up for you.
Some might make you smile. Some might not particularly land at all.
And one might show you something you've been trying very hard to think your way towards.
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