WTWN #93 - Stop asking “Why?" ”How” is the Question.
Asking “How?” can help you better manage anxiety. Or any problem, really.
“You may not believe in evolution, and that is all right. How we humans came to be the way we are is far less important than how we should act now to get out of the mess we have made for ourselves.”
— Jane Goodall (1934), “Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey”
"When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
— Viktor Frankl (1946), “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
Why do I behave like this? Why do I always feel this way?
I used to ask “Why” questions like these in therapy sessions until finally, my therapist suggested it might be the wrong approach.
Perhaps the question was not why, but how?
I’d been looking for answers in my upbringing. But I don’t remember my childhood very well. It's a black box without any practical means of data retrieval.
I don’t remember feeling anxious because I don’t recall feeling much of anything. My mom told me I enjoyed spending time alone, but that’s about it.
Anxiety showed up with a vengeance in my teens when I started getting crushes on girls but couldn’t get a girlfriend to save my life.
I felt like a freak. I memorized 100 decimal points of Pi, created a database of phone booth numbers, and prank-called them until my activities caught the attention of the police, who visited my father at his office since I was still a minor.
I wrote eccentric songs based on science and mythology, one of which was called “Laura and her Planaria.” Another was a ballad about Prometheus, the Titan who defied Zeus and gave fire to humanity.
I dyed my hair orange and positioned the furniture in my room at 45-degree angles to the walls.
I was sixteen.
My behavior might have been considered classic teen stuff if it weren’t so bizarre. In retrospect, I would describe it as a set of coping mechanisms disguised as performance art.
What saved me was the music—listening to it, writing it, and playing it. Later, it was poetry. These tools calmed me and established a foundation for moving forward.
Here we are. Now what?
I may never figure out why I became an anxious person.
It may be my natural temperament. Maybe I absorbed other people’s fears as I was growing up.
It’s been getting worse as I’ve gotten older, because as I get closer to death, it’s not just my imagination that I am running out of time. It’s true!
But asking why can shut things down because I may never know with certainty.
Like the evolution debate suggested by Jane Goodall, maybe it doesn’t matter. Sure, we got here by natural selection — but if someone doesn’t believe that, what difference does it make now?
On the other hand, asking “How?” to re-anchor in the here-and-now is preferable to getting lost in abstract introspection.
I try to stop and ask, How is this anxiety manifesting right now? What am I doing that is creating it? How can I move with it instead of against it? How can I adapt my actions to change the reaction?
And maybe, most importantly, What feelings might I be covering up?
“How” questions don’t demand answers from the past. They represent a shift from autopsy to alchemy, from analysis to evolution.
The real question is not how I got here, but how I will go forward?
And each moment is a new now.
Three questions that can help the shift from “why” to “how”:
"What am I thinking right now?"
"How can I reframe this thought?"
"What's one small step I can take?"
Five senses grounding exercise:
What are five things I can see?
What are four things I can touch?
What are three things I can hear?
What are two things I can smell?
What is one thing I can taste?