Getting to Know Anxiety
What is anxiety?
Anxiety is a normal response to stressful situations that all humans experience. Our bodies and nervous system are incredibly perceptive. When we perceive a threat or a risk to our feelings of safety, security and comfort, our body responds adaptively in order to alert us to the situation and to do something about it. The physical sensations of anxiety are unpleasant, so we are naturally motivated to protect ourselves and reduce our exposure to the stressful situation. Here’s the kicker, these automatic systems are so sophisticated that your body will then link similar situations and provoke the same stress reaction- even in situations we have yet to experience! Although it rarely feels helpful, this stress-response system is credited as a major contributor to the successful evolution of humans. The ability to predict stressful or unsafe situations, and to avoid or adapt them to make the situation more safe has been critical to our survival. Although it sucks, anxiety keeps us out of trouble.
But what is anxiety really?
It can be persistent feelings of fear and worry, feeling on edge, difficulty focusing, bodily sensations like sweating or heart racing, having a hard time sleeping or relaxing. You might have intrusive thoughts or feel in distress. We all experience these feelings at times, but when they become defining features of our days, they become a problem. If it’s hard to find what’s “useful” about your experience of anxiety, that might be a clue. Ultimately only you can know and say if your experience of anxiety is causing you more than reasonable amounts of pain and suffering, or is preventing you from living the life you want.
How does anxiety develop?
We all are born with the stress-response system. As we grow up, our experience of anxiety helps to keep us safe. You can think of it like a thermometer that is gauging whether our actions are safe, acceptable and okay. When anxiety is ripping hot, we know something is wrong, when it’s absent or “cool” we can relax and know we’re going to be okay.
The environment we grow up in serves as a model for what is safe and what isn’t. Because we are social creatures, our experience of anxiety is not limited to physically unsafe situations, but also emotionally unsafe situations. Anxiety helps us to learn what is not okay and to avoid repeating our mistakes. You can imagine how the diverse environments each person is raised in may influence what they soak up in terms of chronic stress, stability, or cultural beliefs about stress.
As we continue to develop, anxiety is again not limited to physical or social safety. We can also experience anxiety about our inner experiences. By this I mean our thoughts and feelings. Sad to say, we are basically too smart for our own good. Humans are uniquely able to merely imagine an anxious situation and have our autonomic stress-response setting off alarm bells. We play out the worst case scenarios in our heads, with the purpose of trying to protect us from some future pain or mistake. All the while, we feel overwhelmed with anxiety, and experience real emotional pain as a result. This emotional pain is so real, that our internal thoughts and feelings can become associated with stress and threat. We become worried about being worried. This experience, just like the physical threats, causes everyday people to want to run from their experiences. When you can’t run from yourself, we want to avoid or block out our feelings, through work, drinking/drugs or numbing, which relieves anxiety in the short term, but increases it in the long term.
Why is anxiety so hard to shake?
Anxiety works. When you are being chased down by a lion, you wouldn’t want to turn off your anxiety. It’s slowing your digestion, priming your muscles, focusing your attention so you can high tail it out of there. In this scenario, you would thank your anxiety for saving your life. In many cases, the anxiety that we learned to protect ourselves socially and emotionally, are still picking up on threats and triggering anxiety as if we are being chased by a lion. It’s nearly impossible to shut down our experience of anxiety.
Your unique learning history likely has influenced you to be sensitive to specific social and emotional threats. For example, if a parent repeatedly told you that it wasn’t okay to cry, you would learn that acceptance is conditional on not expressing sadness. Now as an adult, you may continue to feel deep down that it is not okay to share feelings with others. You may crave close emotional connections and still avoid sharing because the anxiety is too intense to overcome. You know intellectually that you wouldn’t be in danger, but emotionally, your mind would be trying desperately to protect you by flooding you with “put on the breaks” anxious sensations, feelings and thoughts.
Essentially, the stresses of the modern world has outpaced the speed of evolution. Even though we are not in real danger, our ancient brain is still sending intense stress signals during situations we have learned to fear. For another example, if your learning history involves fearful and bad experiences public speaking, you can bet those feelings will be there on your next presentation day. Paradoxically, the more we try to suppress anxious thoughts, the more they intrude on our lives.
What can we do?
Avoiding anxious discomfort is the problem, not the anxiety itself.
You see, we won’t win the war with ourselves and banish anxiety forever. What we can do is change how we relate to our experience of anxiety. In doing so, we can stop giving anxiety so much power over our lives.
We can live a beautiful life, with anxiety.
Here are tried and true methods of shifting our relationship with anxiety:
Acceptance of Anxiety
The first thing when it comes to improving our anxiety is to accept that anxiety is a fact of life. In order to be a living breathing human, you will experience anxiety. While it may seem wonderful and comforting to imagine a world without anxiety, and I wish I could make that happen, it really isn’t possible. If you can imagine someone you think experiences no anxiety, trust me, they do. It may be different or hidden, but it is there. Working through our false beliefs about anxiety and our power over it can go a long, long way to take (realistic) power back.
Learn from your Anxious Self
From my perspective, if you want to learn how to change your experience of anxiety, then it’s essential to learn about how you got here. This is my wheelhouse as a therapist. It really helps to have a trained outside perspective on the influences of your early childhood, identity, family history, culture, race, geographical location, relationships (I could go on) and personal history in order to get a better idea on where the anxiety is coming from, what emotions lie beyond the anxiety, and how to identify triggers of anxiety.
Listen to the Feelings Underneath your Anxiety
I just alluded to the fact that there are often emotions and deeper hurts underlying the experience of anxiety. Perhaps you experienced repeated rejections from friends growing up. The anxiety you may now feel in social situations likely is related to this history of pain and your innate desire to avoid further pain. Getting to know why you feel the way you feel can go a long way in soothing yourself and remembering that you aren’t feeling this way “for no reason”. You and your feelings make sense.
Know your Values
If you could imagine for a minute: What you would ideally be doing if anxiety was not blocking you? What would you come up with? Would you be connecting with friends or going on a date? These examples could point you to valuing spending quality time, or engaging in emotional intimacy. Values are guiding principles that can direct our behavior. When we are in an anxiety storm, our values are something concrete to hold on to.
Respond to your Anxiety in Kind and Sensitive Ways
Once we get in touch with our emotions related to anxiety, and know our values, we can start to look at how to make changes that are either soothing or empowering (or both)! Picking up from the previous example, you might be able to give yourself a break and acknowledge that socializing is really hard for you right now. You might say, “It makes sense that I feel this way right now”. Feeling more calm, and remembering that you do in fact, value quality time, you might nudge yourself to call a friend you haven’t spoken to in awhile.
Working over time to develop your understanding of your anxiety and how to cope with it is worth the effort. Eventually, anxiety becomes a smaller part of a much bigger life. You can learn to not let anxiety stand in the way of living the life you want. You also deserve support along the way! Therapy for anxiety is my specialty, so I know you can find a better relationship with your anxiety. If you’re ready to get started, reach out today.
Wishing you ease and balance even with anxiety!
Julia
