Confidence and Anxiety

Confidence is believing that you can rely on your circumstance and act in a “right, proper, or effective way.” It’s critical to living a full life, as you’re able to make decisions and move your life forward from a position of calm and certainty. It’s not a big deal to decide, for example, if you’ll have leftover pasta or salad for dinner. It’s just something that happens. You happen to make salad. Okay, you’ll just have pasta the next day. No worries.

Does this sound like you? It definitely doesn’t sound like me. I don’t have a lot of confidence. In fact, an antonym of confidence is anxiety, which I have in spades. Anxiety is “an abnormal and overwhelming sense of apprehension and fear often marked by…self-doubt about one’s capacity to cope with it.”

I worry about what to have for dinner and when: should we have pasta leftovers or something new? I freeze with uncertainty, unable to make a decision. Even something this small can make me wonder what if the answer is leftovers but I picked salad and we should have had pasta instead. But who really cares what we have? It’s all got to be eaten anyway, whether that’s today or tomorrow.

It’s the night before I go to the pool. I’m not sleeping; instead I’m worrying if I’ve packed everything I need (including underwear for when I take off my swimsuit – extremely important). Will the parking lot be full? Will there be a lot of people in the locker room and in the ‘slow’ swimming lane? So far it’s been fine. I’ve brought what I need, there’s lots of parking room, and the pool hasn’t been busy. Indeed, one could say it’s been ideal. And it was the same last week, too. So, really no need to worry. But this is my reality in dealing with anxiety. 

By far the anxiety that has the most negative impact on my life is that which I have when I’m outdoors in the mountains and on the trail. Last fall I conquered some of that anxiety by making it up to a particular glacier forefield in the Rockies. There was a lot of emotion riding on this hike, after two failed attempts in previous years. This hike also has special meaning for us because it’s one of the last hikes we did with our first dog, Tsuga, before he passed away, and it’s likely the last hike with our current dog, Silah, as she’s starting to have problems with her hind end. More specifically, she’s stopped being able to climb the stairs from the basement up to the main floor, and we’ve had to resort to walking her around the house outside and taking her in the front door.  

The hike starts off easily. From the parking lot we walk through scrub brush of willow and alder that’s being colonized by pine and spruce until the trail connects with what seems like an old gravel graded road. After a short walk on the road we get into the true spruce/pine forest, with its root-slick trail. It’s hard to navigate with a dog clipped to your hip belt who wants to be first in line, and I can feel my anxiety rising. The scent of subalpine forest fills the air, especially when we brush against trees with our packs on. The snow caught in the trees falls off as we pass, sometimes trickling down the back of our necks for an unwelcome snow bath.

We climb a bit in elevation and emerge on the shores of a mid-sized lake turned aquamarine by glacier flour. We take a break at the lake so I can breathe and calm my anxiety, and look across to the glacier cirque above, our destination for this hike. It seems insurmountable, with an alluvial fan to cross. I feel like Silah, looking up the staircase and thinking “Nope, can’t do that.” The fan has spread widely out of the glacier valley, likely due to a heat dome in the previous years that increased glacier melt and produced a massive rush of water that expanded the fan and pushed rocks into the forest.

After our break, we continue around the edge of the lake on the root-slick trail. Where the fan has overrun the trail, we have to route-find across it, stumbling on snow-covered rounded stones. This is a part of the trail that neither Silah nor I enjoy. Once we walk up the fan we hook up again with the forest trail, then onto the rock again on a faint trail that switchbacks in small increments up to the glacier forefield.

I’m ecstatic when I get to the cirque, though it was slow going and I had to stop, breathe deeply, and overcome some serious mental obstacles. But I did it—I made it up, with Silah, and I get the view down to the lake as my prize. My legs are exhausted and shaking on the way back down, but I feel alive like I haven’t in a while. Which tells me that getting out hiking is one of the biggest things I need to build my confidence in, so I can get out into the amazing places that feed my soul.

I can start to regain my confidence by dealing with the anxiety I have when I go to my local Cobble Hill Mountain and its 25 km of trails. Will the trail be too steep, will my legs get tired, what if someone hears me huffing and puffing—what will they think of me? What if I see a bear (surprisingly, this is pretty low on my list of anxieties, but high on my husband’s)? It interferes with my ability to be outside fully and happily, to enjoy myself on the trails and make the most of my experience. But I find if I focus on small things on the trail, changes over the seasons, for example, the overarching anxiety tones itself down a bit. So if I look at ferns and flowers and streams and tree trunks and really take them in, the anxiety drops a bit. Nature helps if I can get out from under the cloak of anxiety and actually ‘see’ things.

Constant anxiety is exhausting, and I can’t do back-to-back day hikes because I have to recover from the stress of each one. So I’m doing an experiment. Partially to see if I can do enough exercise without tiring myself too much from anxiety, but as a side project to see if I can increase my confidence by talking myself through repeated anxiety-inducing situations and experiencing for myself that they’re manageable. Kind of like immersion therapy, but not quite.

So, for example, I’ll go to Cobble Hill Mountain twice a week. Because I haven’t been in a while, I’m pretty much starting over, so I’ll do a short hike each time. I’ll increase the intensity of my hike each week for four weeks, then make it longer and lower intensity again. While this is meant to be a fitness test, it will also help my confidence. If I can drive to the mountain (only 5 mins away), park, hike even with huffing and puffing, and get safely out of the parking lot and home, that will help build my confidence. I’ll try positive self-talk, breathing exercises, and talking my anxiety monster down by name (I haven’t got a name yet, all suggestions welcome) when I feel anxious. I’m not convinced it will help, but it’s better than nothing. The idea is to prepare me for those tough moments on the trail, making me a more confident hiker who can get to where she wants to go without being held hostage by anxiety.

Anxiety is my enemy—confidence is my goal.