Beware of the Quick Fix

As I’ve worked over the years with anxiety sufferers, and especially people with OCD, I have noticed something: A lot of people want quick fixes.

And why wouldn’t they? Anxiety sucks. OCD sucks. And so fixing it as fast as possible is completely rational. In every other area of our lives, the quicker the better: When I order my food, how fast do I want it? As fast as possible! When I order something from Amazon Prime, how soon do I want it? As fast as possible! When I sprain my ankle or injure myself, how fast do I want it to heal? As fast as possible!  In just about every part of life, we’re all about speed.

But mental health doesn’t work like this. And anxiety in particular doesn’t.

An English psychologist and ex-OCD sufferer I follow on social media named ‘Anxiety Josh’ put this up on his Instagram account recently: ‘In order to see long term results with anxiety healing – one must stop focusing on quick fixes, the solution, or other external validators.’

He went on: ‘While coping strategies and external factors may help quell the anxiety for a little while, it does not directly heal the relationship one has with anxiety. In order to feel true relief, one must build confidence in their ability to handle anxiety. You are the one dealing it – not the magic pill or teacher – so you deserve the credit for being able to learn how to deal with it and sit in your uncomfortable feelings and sensations’ (emphasis in original).

What does he mean here? Why is seeking a quick fix such a problem?

Trying to fix anxiety quickly is like trying to bring your heart rate down as fast as possible by having someone put a gun to your head.  The more you rush, the more your mind feels panicked. And panic is anxiety. So rushing makes anxiety worse. I like the way ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) founder Steven Hayes puts it: ‘If you can’t have it, you’ve got it’. By this he means if you ‘can’t’ have anxiety (ie. you refuse to have it or you think you can’t tolerate it), then you WILL have it. It’s the paradoxical nature of anxiety. It only starts to go away when you don’t care if it’s there or not. But while you really care that it’s there, it won’t go away.

So here’s the question: Can you sit with the anxiety? Can you tolerate it? If you can’t (but you can, you just think you can’t), then the anxiety won’t go away. In fact, it will compound. It’s only when you’re willing to accept your anxiety, to let it be there, that, ironically, it starts to go away. 

This really is a strange situation. It goes against almost every instinct that we have.  I suppose something else that works a bit the same way is investing.  If you want to do well in the stock market, the best thing to do for most people is buy a large low-cost index fund and then just do nothing.  But it is well known and well documented, that this turns out to be very hard for most people to do.  Doing ‘nothing’ is bizarrely, harder for investors to do than doing ‘something’. Why? Because it feels better to be busy doing things - researching companies, reading reports, buying and selling. In a highly cited 2000 paper titled ‘Trading is Hazardous to Your Wealth’, authors Barber and Odean explain how and why the vast majority of investors fiddle around too much with their portfolio and are worse off for it (due to brokerage fees, chasing fads, FOMO etc). Had they just done nothing, they would not only have saved themselves a lot of time, they also would have enjoyed the power of compound interest and become a lot richer.

It’s the exact same thing as anxiety. In both these domains we want to follow our natural intuition - which works great in most domains of life remember – of doing things to solve a problem. It’s very counterintuitive that to solve a problem what you need to do is…nothing. That’s almost never a good idea in the rest of life.  But with anxiety (and investing) it is.