How to show, not tell when writing about characters struggling with... generalized anxiety
How to use your character's worries to reveal aspects of personality and shape their arc
Hi all,
For the next few newsletters, I’ll be focusing on anxiety disorders. I’ll attempt to tease apart how you can show, not tell, different types of anxiety in your writing. Today, we’re going to start with the broadest category:
Generalized Anxiety Disorder
Like depression, anxiety frequently appears in writing. There’s the racing heart and rapid breaths and flat-out terror that are familiar fodder for writers. But what separates a character feeling anxious from a character with an anxiety disorder, and why would would knowing the difference be helpful in your writing?
Read on, writers, read on.
As always, all opinions are my own. Included symptoms can be further studied in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5-TR, available at psychiatry.org.
Okay, let’s get to it!
Generalized anxiety vs. other types of anxiety:
What’s the difference? Why would you want to write about one vs the other?
Generalized anxiety is just that, general. It’s distinct from panic disorder (we’ll talk about this on some other week), although you can have panic attacks that come along WITH generalized anxiety. Social anxiety and specific phobias are also distinct (also upcoming!). People with generalized anxiety can worry about all kinds of things: money, something happening to loved ones, global warming— really, anything.
However, and importantly, the worries aren’t random. For characters with generalized anxiety, their anxiety is typically what we call ego-syntonic, that is, it’s like a stinging cloud of bees that target the most important areas, while filling the head with their ceaseless buzzing. It hurts, it’s distracting, and it’s just plain difficult to go about daily life while there are bees buzzing around.
But the places the anxiety-bees sting are important. So while people with generalized anxiety are often anxious about a sweeping variety of things, the more you know your character, the more you’ll understand the areas to highlight. You can also then use their bee-swarm to highlight aspects of personality.
Essentially, someone with generalized anxiety will have this nebulous, free-floating anxiety that attaches onto things that may not make sense/seem very logical, but really is. Use your character’s anxiety to highlight what they care about. Let’s say their partner is late coming home from work. Do they worry their partner got in an accident? Does this worry send them from decision to decision, until they end up virtually stalking their partner’s ex to see if they’re together and setting a chain of events in motion that can’t be stopped? Meanwhile, maybe their partner is just late because they were picking up flowers, and this results in a big argument. Bad example, but highlights what I’m talking about.
Essentially, your character’s anxiety can shape their arc.
One thing of note before we launch into ways to show, not tell when it comes to anxiety: generalized anxiety is more than just occasional worry or terror. If your character has a generalized anxiety disorder, they will worry most of the time (the technical criteria features the very wordy phrasing “for more days than not, over the last six months). So this will also shape how other characters respond to them (see above, re: partner with flowers).
Other thing to note- people with generalized anxiety are often pretty good in a crisis. Because, at its core, anxiety exists to prepare us for action, to prepare us to fight the dragon about to charbroil us. So when there is an actual crisis, that anxiety gets put to use. When the crisis is over, it goes back to being free-floating, and there can be a crash.
Something to think about.
Some ways to write about generalized anxiety:
FEELINGS:
Characters experiencing generalized anxiety may FEEL: anxious (I’m sure that comes as a complete surprise), tense, irritable. What this may look like if you want to SHOW, not TELL: physically, characters may experience significant muscle tension. How this could show up: headaches. Back aches. Sore jaws. They may also have difficulty concentrating. So if you want to show, not tell, generalized anxiety, how about going for a frequently irritable person who forgets a lot of things and is constantly rubbing at their forehead due to tension headaches? They’ll also tire easily, but may have trouble sleeping.
The thing about tiring easily is this— a lot of physical effort is going into that muscle tension and tightness. So if someone is going around clenching their jaw all day, of course that’s going to be tiring! It’s the equivalent of carrying a 50lb weight on your shoulders.
The sleep difficulties often come along with the next section—
THOUGHTS:
Characters experiencing anxiety may THINK in a few consistent types of patterns. They’ll jump to conclusions. They’ll catastrophize. They’ll see a pattern in a single event and draw overly broad conclusions.
What does all this mean? It means the brain is trying to prepare for danger. Think about it— jumping to conclusion comes in two flavors: mind reading (guessing what others are thinking about us) and fortune-telling (imagining outcomes). Both of these exist to attempt to be protective (e.g., if we identify that our boss hates us, we’ll be prepared to be fired and it won’t hurt as much). So the brain is constantly looking for signs that danger is near, to be safe from threat. Except, if we then aren’t fired, that’s a lot of energy that went nowhere!
These thoughts will also race. They’ll move fast. They’ll be loud and scary and overwhelming (again, swarm of bees). Which makes sense in a way— if you wanted to warn someone of danger, you’d be as loud and pushy as possible to make them listen! This is what our thoughts do in those moments.
To show, not tell racing thoughts— play with pacing! Let your writing shine on the line level. Don’t overdo this, but it can help to highlight moments of overwhelm.
For example:
The author, serene, snuggled with a cat, was typing this very newsletter when the anxiety swarm attacked. From a slow, languorous meditation on the ways one can write about anxiety in a non-stigmatizing way, her mind was suddenly full of thought-bees, intent on disaster.
Oh my goodness, she thought, sitting up with a jerk that sent her cat tumbling to the floor. The cat blinked his big, round eyes at her and sauntered off, entirely unbothered, the complete catty opposite of the coiled writer on the couch. She rubbed at her aching neck as the familiar headache started to build.
You’re just writing nonsense, her thoughts hissed. No one will find this useful. Who do you think you are, writing a newsletter? Remember that one time in college when someone told you they didn’t like your writing style? Everyone’s going to agree and you’ll never publish a book and will just fade away here on this couch until you die and your cats eat you. The voices swirled around and around until she slammed her laptop shut and closed her eyes in exhaustion.
So if we look at the above definitely fictional example, the thoughts I included are examples of jumping to conclusions (no one will find this useful), drawing a pattern based on a single event (the college memory), and catastrophizing (I hope) (you’ll never publish a book).
While there may be grains of truth in such thoughts, oftentimes the percentage likelihood of them occurring is vastly lower than they’re felt to be. Let’s take the example waaaay above, of the character worrying about her partner getting in a car accident. Her partner has driven the same route every day for the past ten years, and has never been in an accident. So let’s say the partner drives twice a day, every day of the week, going to work and back. Here are the odds (I bet you didn’t think math would be showing up in this newsletter— that’s your mind forming predictions! We all do this!) Per the internet, which is never wrong, there are approximately 251 work days in 2024. Let’s say that 250 is the average over the last ten years. That says that the partner drives the same route 500 times in a year. Over ten years, that’ll be around 5000. Without an accident. So the odds of that occurring? Low. But generalized anxiety/jumping to conclusions, says it’s HIGH.
Okay, that’s enough math. Phew.
To sum up the above (guess I’ve got math on the mind now), people jump to conclusions in fairly predictable ways. So decide what your character’s core worries and assumptions are, and build them out. This again can go back to the core beliefs mentioned in the last newsletter.
For example, do they believe they’re unlovable? They may worry about people leaving them all the time.
ACTIONS:
How characters experiencing anxiety may ACT/what they may DO:
They may seek a lot of reassurance. They may develop rituals to help soothe (e.g., if they worry about loved ones dying, they may call a loved one every night).
Or, they may avoid the source of anxiety, and anything connected to it. It’s a human drive to move away from pain. Unworkable, and can lead to suffering, but it happens.
To know how your character’s actions may be impacted, think about some of the things underlying their anxiety.
For example:
Character’s father gets into a car crash
Character worries the next time they drive that the same thing will happen to them.
The next time they have to drive, they start worrying in advance.
They start worrying about cars broadly, not just their own car.
Panics when their husband comes home late, yells at him for not calling when they walk in the door.
They then seek reassurance
EXAMPLE
Because generalized anxiety is about patterns, I wasn’t able to find a succinct example from things I’ve read recently. One (not great) classic example could be The Cowardly Lion, from The Wizard of Oz. He’s not actually a coward! He’s just anxious!!! His anxiety is very highly dramatized though, and at least in the movie is not a great portrayal of generalized anxiety as a lot of it is used for comic relief (don’t do this, folks). All respect and love to The Wizard of Oz, but yeah… don’t make your anxious characters your comic relief. Anxiety is pain. Anxiety can be absolute hell. The mind turns into a battlefield and the core self suffers. The one reason the Wizard of Oz does work here is because there was something that was core to the Lion that shaped his arc— he valued his friendships, and standing up for them. Which, in the end, is what his courage granted him: ability to stand up more for what he believed in.
And with that, I come to the end of this newsletter!
Thank you for reading all of this, and I hope this is helpful!
Questions?
Comments?
Please let me know! And stay tuned for my next post, which will be about how to show, not tell, how characters may struggle with social anxiety!
And now, a very silly picture of my kitten, looking very anxious, the poor bean.
I’m going to put down this laptop, and go give her a hug.
