Photo by Ryanniel Masucol
The Internal Feeling of Dread
- [thē in-ˈtər-nᵊl ˈfē-liŋ əvˈdred]
phrase
A feeling of guilt and/or anxiety that manifests within oneself despite nothing actively going wrong in one’s life. It’s often characterized by a pit in your stomach or the literal “Jaws” theme song playing on loop in the back of your mind.
Example: Everything in my life seems like it’s aligning and has been going so well lately, but I can’t get rid of the Internal Feeling of Dread like something will go wrong.
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I’ll be honest, despite the world around me seemingly falling apart, I’ve run into a string of good events in my life as of late. I should be celebrating — instead, I’ve been worrying about exactly when this is all going to end. I spend hours each day counting down the seconds until my luck inevitably runs out, just as it has in the past. It’s impossible for only good things to happen — the bad must come, too. Even with this knowledge, I can’t seem to rid myself of the Internal Feeling of Dread.
The Internal Feeling of Dread (IFD) is a phrase I made up for the horrible feeling my anxiety creates whenever things are going a little too well. It feels like when you’re about 40 minutes deep into an hour long horror movie and the protagonist seems to have resolved everything; you know there’s no way the peace is ever going to last, but you have no clue when it’s going to end. Like the moment right before the drop on a rollercoaster, full of absolute uncertainty.
I could win the lottery tomorrow and I think the sheer amount of dread I would experience would be enough to kill me.
The happier or more excited I am about something, the more sure I am that the moment of joy I’m experiencing will crash and burn. I’ve managed to convince myself that there is no high in my life that can exist without a painful low.
Years of therapy have never seemed to stop the IFD that seems to live deep in the recesses of my brain, determined to make sure I never have a moment that exists without worrying about something or someone. I’ve heard the same thing throughout therapy in the past: The only way to cope with this incessant fear is to recognize that you can’t control everything around you. This is easier said than done. When I asked my therapists how to relinquish my need to manage every aspect of my life, down to the minute details, I was never given a feasible directive.
So, left to my own devices, how can I handle the Internal Feeling of Dread?
It seems like it’ll never go away. Like it’s been with us all since the day we were born. But, the thing is, the longer we treat it like something impossible to get rid of, the harder it gets to deal with it.
As a self-identified control freak, the IFD comes most often when I have no idea what comes next. It’s my brain saying to itself, “Something bad is going to happen because I cannot predict the future. Therefore, I have decided that whatever happens next has to be bad; there’s absolutely no other possible outcome.”
Newsflash to my brain: This absolutely isn’t true. Lacking control over a situation doesn’t mean that the outcome is going to be bad. Having something great happen in your life doesn’t mean that the next thing you experience will end the world.
I’ve come to realize that some of the best experiences in life have come from unpredictable situations. During the peak of COVID, my anxiety was so awful I couldn’t bring myself to go outside of my apartment unless I was with someone else. I was convinced something terrible would happen to me and, at that point, dread was practically synonymous with my everyday emotions. The first day I went back out by myself, I made a last-minute decision to head into a crowd of people celebrating the results of the 2020 election in Columbus Circle. I’ll never forget how freeing it felt to be independent again. If I had let the feeling of dread win that day, I don’t know when I would have gotten past my growing anxiety.
That singular, impulsive moment, like most unpredictable decisions, was an opportunity to learn something new and do something I had never done before — and, sure, maybe there was a chance it could have gone horribly wrong. But, ultimately, who cares? Bad things are just that: bad things. They’re instances that don’t last forever. They suck and are never fun to deal with, but we wouldn’t be human if only good things ever happened to us.
Everything I’m saying is advice I could use to hear whenever the Internal Feeling of Dread begins to rear its ugly head. It’s hard to remember that there was ever a time you lived without it when the gut feeling of anxiety and doubt begins.
There was and there will be times and spaces in which you feel free of the IFD. Trust me, I know how hard it is to recognize that it’s possible, but it is. The worry I experience following my happiest moments wasn’t there during them; it manifests itself after, simply because I’m still working on accepting my lack of control. In those moments when I was in the crowd that November, none of the anxiety that had loomed over me for months was with me anymore. Sure, it came back a few days after, but it wasn’t a constant and it never will be. As I work towards giving up my desire to control the world around me, I have to learn how freeing it is in the moments when I do allow myself to sit back and let things just happen.
The best way to handle the Internal Feeling of Dread is to acknowledge it and work towards acceptance; acceptance of the situation you’re in, the place you’re at and the world constantly changing around you. The IFD is not a monstrous creature within me that can take my happiest moments and ruin them forever with doubts, fears and worry. I won’t give it that power. It’s a part of my anxiety — like many others — that is ultimately manageable when I begin to realize I cannot control the world around me. No one can!
This type of acceptance and internal healing isn’t linear. I find myself feeling like I’ve gone completely backward in my progress towards fighting off the IFD at least once a week. Being kinder to myself in these moments, however, allows me to further my progress.
Combatting anxiety takes time. None of us can control everything in our lives, and yes, bad things will inevitably happen, but I think it’s time I start to realize that worrying through the happy parts will only ruin those as well.
If the Internal Feeling of Dread had a physical manifestation, I think the end of this piece would be where I challenged it to some sort of UFC boxing match. Instead, I’ll finish it off by making a promise to myself to be gentle to my brain throughout this process.
The IFD won’t last forever.