How Quitting (Almost) Everything Helped Me Stop Feeling Anxious and Start Working for What I Believe In

I am a certified quitter — I have 4 major acts of quitting my name in my recent past. They are, in chronological order: my job, exercising, my own business and therapy.

Far from making me an unemployed lazybones of questionable sanity, my big 4 quits have actually helped me start making a living in line with my values.

This is how.

. . .

The Fog

I didn’t start with everything I needed, but I started with enough; a serious problem, a few good friends and a quiet voice of greater truth inside of me.

The serious problem, for me, was the numbness that preceded anxiety. I called it ‘the fog’.

Getting out of ‘the fog’ taught me a lot of what I would need to know to find greater satisfaction from what I’m doing in life.

That would come later…

When I was in the fog I was numb to my body, numb to my desires, to my strengths, to my spark, to my own numbness.

And there was a fog making machine running within me. It ran full bore, all the time, and so silently I didn’t even realize it was there.

The motor was a habit.

The cogs were “things I should be doing”, all these ideas I had about how to keep myself safe.

And the fuel it consumed was me.

That’s a fancy way of dressing up an eating disorder and the disconnection from reality that is its symptom and cause.

But that’s where I was.

And having been through that machine I see the numbing power of habit and the grinding insistence of “shoulds” (and “should nots”) a lot in how people engage with the climate crisis.

The first step away from that, for me, was to stop, to quit.

I quit my job and the protective blanket of the teaching profession where I felt secure.

And I quit the exercise routine that was running my body into the ground and keeping me numb.

Stopping meant the motor of habit was switched off, and the cogs of the shoulds and should nots were still and clearly visible for the first time.

I quit my way out of the fog (self-five!).

That’s what brought me to anxiety (facepalm!)

Anxiety

Turns out that when I removed two of my protections I felt wholly unprepared for the complex feelings that make up a full and complete life.

Luckily… actually… no. It was not luck.

There was no luck to finding a therapist.

There was an act of googling, clicking, calling and paying. It was lucky we were a good match.

But the motivation to actually open a new (private) tab and google “counseling online UK” came from a different place.

I would be doing a disservice to my “quiet voice” by not giving credit where credit is due.

My quiet voice is something you can’t hear, and not because I just need to speak up.

It was the voice in my head that whispered my desires and my heartfelt truths to me.

It’s the one that told me to quit the job that wasn’t right for me, to stop exercising, and to get help.

It’s kind of the hero here. It was also the source of a lot of anxiety.

I came to see anxiety as a conflict between the shoulds in my head and the quiet voice in my heart.

Any time these two got to bickering I was paralyzed by indecision and self-critical about how I was feeling. I often just shut back down into the fog.

Again, I see how conflicting voices lead to anxiety in a lot of anxious, environmentally conscious people.

I see people who are torn by the system of opportunities that enables our heart’s desires and also tells us that we shouldn’t.

If you’ve ever flown to see friends and family, and simultaneously told yourself about the carbon footprint, then you’ve felt it.

It was a hard conflict to resolve in myself; it was going to be a while before I was doing any more quitting.

Awareness (was not enough)

Through therapy, I was constantly becoming more aware.

Awareness alone made things a lot worse for me.

I felt the pain of an abusive past, felt torn between my quiet voice and my shoulds, felt frustrated at myself for not having the life I thought I wanted.

When I quit my job, and again when I stopped exercising, I had unwittingly done two other things that took me out of my anxiety.

The first was to accept the parts of myself that I was becoming aware of.

My friends helped by validating my feelings and making them real to me at a time when I couldn’t make them real to myself (thanks friends!).

And my aching body helped me accept the suggestion of my quiet voice to do a month of yoga (thanks Yoga with Adriene!).

The second was to actually do something about that.

For yoga, this was easy. Having a youtube video tell you what to do for 45 minutes is actually pretty nice, especially when it involves a lot of pillows and rubbing your sore back.

With work, it was anything but easy to stand up for myself for the first time in my life.

I still remember shaking inside while having the “I quit” conversation (in my third and shakiest language, Italian, to boot).

Looking back, I feel like my work and my body were causing me such trouble that it pushed me through the process of awareness, acceptance and action.

It would be a while till I could consistently go through all three stages, quit some more without too much anxiety, and bring myself closer to my values.

Practice

I’d like to think I am a person of integrity; I’ve barely stolen anything (movies don’t count).

I have a plate from a fancy dinner that I shouldn’t have.

And I stole the book that changed my life.

It’s called the Six Pillars of Self-Esteem, and I took it from a bookshelf in a co-living space.

It was another little quiet voice moment that turned out pretty well.

Over the course of about 9 months, I used the book to consistently practice awareness, acceptance, and taking action.

I performed poems. I spoke to girls. I noticed I wanted a tattoo and now I have three (I’ll probably be dealing with addiction later)…

There was still some anxiety in there, for sure. But it’s down to the amount I imagine is more or less normal, rather than the amount that counts as a disorder.

Which is why I could do my last 2 big quits.

I came to accept that my failing business was failing, and that the quiet voice had better plans for me.

It was back with a little whisper about how much I like trees, and butterflies, and how it would be great if, somehow, I could arrange for myself to be taking care of those things using a keyboard and words.

It was far easier to quit my business than my job. Not that I could just throw it away in an instant. There was a lot of sunk cost thinking to battle through.

But I knew, I knew then that the quiet voice was right more often than it was wrong. That if it was telling me to stop making online courses (and very little money!) and start writing for environmental businesses, then it might just be right again.

And the quiet voice started telling me that I had enough of what I needed to carry on without therapy.

So I quit that too, and focus my energy now on things like this. Real things, in the real world.

. . .

Living Better

Instead of therapy, I try to practice living better.

To me, that means listening to that quiet voice and responding to it. If there’s a jolt of anxiety then to me it’s a sign. There’s a conflict that needs to be resolved.

Or talked about. Or written about. Or noted down for later examination.

Just so long as I do something to respond. That, to me, is the practice of living better.

It’s brought me closer in line with my values. It’s helped me quit the things that don’t serve me and has led me to work for something I believe in.

Am I in a stable position where I’m doing exactly what I want and am having a great impact on the ecological crisis? Nope. Not even close.

But I am closer.

And that alone makes me far less anxious.

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Previously published on Medium.com.

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