Anxiety Demon
A personal reflection on how I learned to live with one of my demons.
And how I started making it work for me.
It happens to a lot of people. You’re at the doctor’s office, and it’s time for your vaccine. Oh, here comes the pain. My arms get tingly, I can barely feel my hands, and my stomach tightens. I focus on my breathing and close my eyes. Suddenly, a tiny prick—and it’s over. This feels like a silly example but sometimes, the of fear the potential pain is bigger than the actual pain itself.
Like many people, I’ve dealt with anxiety for a good portion of my life. While I’ve had periods where I could momentarily forget about it. I’ve also gone through difficult eras where it caused me physical pain. After a lot of therapy and huge amounts of self-work, I finally understand what triggers my anxiety and how to keep it under control.
Recently, I watched Inside Out 2, and it reminded me just how much my relationship with anxiety has changed. The Inside Out movies are a great way to explain emotions, showing how Riley’s primary emotions (Joy, Anger, Fear, Sadness, and Disgust) help her navigate life. In the sequel, we meet more complex emotions that emerge during puberty: Ennui, Envy, Embarrassment, and Anxiety. This last one pushes Riley to the edge, using her imagination against her, making her second-guess herself, and planting a dark new thought: I am not enough.
Yikes.
This felt familiar. But surprisingly, it didn’t hit me as hard anymore. I felt calm, with a tinge of sadness, watching Riley struggle. I had been there, but now, my anxiety sits like an exotic pet at my feet. Sometimes a bit wild, but mostly domesticated. I almost wanted to reach through the screen and tell her: No, no, you can channel that energy and creativity in a way that benefits you!
Make your demons work for you. Don’t let them live rent-free in your head.
Here is a very personal journey.
It’s self-reflection time
Recognizing the demonIt took me a while to figure out I had anxiety. I had normalized it so much that it was just part of my life. If someone told me, "We need to talk," I would have a stomach ache leading up to the conversation. If I had a bit too much fun on a night out, the endless overthinking: "I did something wrong", was just the price of that extra glass of wine. Made the wrong joke? Of course, I had erased all the good memories and now my friendship was in peril and everyone hated me.
These thoughts happen to everyone. Right? To some extent, I would say yes. But they shouldn’t. Everyone makes mistakes, but you shouldn’t torture yourself for countless hours.
It wasn’t until I started therapy for a completely unrelated reason (my story with toxic relationships is for another time) that I got diagnosed with mild depression and mild anxiety. Fun. I remember joking, "Well, at least they aren’t spicy. Those would be harder to handle."
Even before the diagnosis, I used to imagine all these negative thoughts as a little demon thing. A black, vaguely cat-shaped figure that would get in between my feet and yell at me at night. I would draw this little demon every now and then, and at one point I wrote a short story in college of how I would have to feed it chicken bones even though I was vegetarian back then. I think this visualization was heavily inspired by this short film, In Between, where a woman learns to live with a crocodile as a manifestation of her anxiety.
In Between - Animation Short Film 2012 - GOBELINS
Living with the Demon"You are not the first one. And you are certainly not the last one," say the opening lines of In Between. "You’ll get through it very well, I assure you."
During the next few minutes, we watch the protagonist struggle to get rid of her crocodile by pushing it away to no avail. She is finally able to coexist with it, and even find it cute, when she starts setting limits to it. She has accepted the crocodile.
After my diagnosis, I wondered what to do next.
I stayed on track with therapy and asked for homework. I wrote. I sat in my own discomfort, trying to unravel it. I sought out stories that explored trauma and anxiety (shoutout to Legend of Korra). I made playlists. I wrote more. More therapy, more conversations with friends. A lot of reading and, most importantly, brutal honesty with myself.
This process has taken years. I’ll share more about why it was so complex in future blogs, but in short, my anxiety was tangled up with other personal traumas. That’s why it was so hard to pinpoint and isolate. A normal situation, like a friend taking a bit too long to reply, would make me spiral into: “I did something wrong. They hate me. I screwed up completely”. Over time, those thoughts have quieted. I’ve learned to take a moment, think things through rationally, and calm down my silly little anxiety pet.
Time has also helped. I know myself better now. I know what sets the demon off. It's like training a strange, exotic pet. Heavy foods give me a stomach ache similar to an anxiety flare, so I try to avoid them. Too much drinking, and I’ll toss and turn all night, my brain chewing on the same mistake. Investing energy in people who don’t invest the same in me? That one used to send me into a very negative place, questioning my own worth. I’ve learned to focus my love and care on people who are willing to give it back.
Recently, my new therapist (hi, Dani!) mentioned something that stuck with me: Some of these triggers wouldn’t bother you if you were doing well. And after long years of self-reflection, I think I’m almost there. A demon, fully domesticated.
Anxiety demon sketch
DOMESTICATING THE DEMON
My exotic pet is capable of a lot of damage. Hyper-fixating on the smallest details, turning over every single word I’ve said, seeing a situation from every possible angle like the mysterious Borgian Aleph, imagining endless scenarios like alternative realities, and trying to come up with strategies for each of them. It has endless energy. It’s a tornado, a monster, a demon. If I don’t stop it, it won’t stop.
By now, I know I can keep it under control if I avoid certain behaviors and stick to a healthy lifestyle. Long walks and good conversations are like walking it on a leash, but every now and then, it needs to run free.
And that’s when I realized something. All the vices I mentioned above, overanalyzing, overplanning, and obsessing over details, could actually be virtues in the right context. Organizing an event and need to think through every detail? Planning a new feature and trying to anticipate potential user pain points? Refining a content strategy to make sure it holds up under every possible scenario? Those are jobs for a demon.
That’s when I learned I could let the demon run free: at work. Still within a controlled space so it wouldn’t go crazy, but I could unleash my anxiety on specific projects where overthinking was an asset.
A recent example was when I was creating a content strategy for training an LLM (read more here) and I needed to document the process for my intern. Since we worked in different time zones, my instructions had to be crystal clear and cover as many scenarios as possible so I wouldn’t slow down his work while I slept.
I gave my demon a task: Be as thorough as you can be. Think of everything. Test it. Make sure anyone would understand it.
Now go. Run wild and free.
Learn to live with your demons
It would be misleading if I sold this as something that happened overnight. Like one day I simply changed my perspective and immediately took control. It would also be a lie if I told you this demon never has its wild days anymore. Despite my best efforts, I sometimes get bad stomach aches when I hear "we need to talk”. I still try to avoid french food as much as I can, it’s too heavy for me. Although croissants are fine, always.
These days, for the most part, the demon just bites my ankles every now and then and makes me apologize for things I shouldn’t. It’s more silly than dangerous.
Thinking of my anxiety as something external to me has helped me understand it.
I am not the demon; I just have to deal with one. It might be with me forever, but if I can recognize it, accept it, understand it, and even become fond of some aspects of it, I can harness it.
In the past, I was more afraid of what could happen, but when something actually did happen, it was never as bad as I had imagined. I’ve survived every crazy situation I found myself in. Most of the things I worried about never turned out to be as bad as I thought. The fear of pain was worse than the actual pain.
These days, the demon works too, it has to pay rent for living in my head.
With time, we have become pretty decent roommates.
That’s Enough About Me!What do you think? What should I focus on next?
Do you also deal with anxiety? Would thinking about it as something external help you? Maybe you are curious to see how I’ve dealt with depression?
Let me know—shoot me an email or write a comment below! 😊
📩 sifuentesanita@gmail.com