Today I want to talk about the most common form of emotional dysfunction present in today’s world. Can you guess what it is? What if you’re wrong and it’s something totally different? What if it isn’t the thing you saw in the title at all? What if something goes wrong? Of course you now know the topic of today’s session. Anxiety. That feeling in the pit of your stomach that causes your whole body to kick into survival mode. Heartrate goes up, temperature goes up, and it begins to feel like your body and mind are hooked up to a car battery. As the voltage increases, and courses through you, your mind starts to race and find ways to connect all the stress, all the worries, all the things to do, all the things you wish you hadn’t done, and before you know it, both your body and mind feel out of control. Like a snowball rolling down a mountain, your stress gets bigger and bigger until you find yourself curled up in the fetal position praying for the fear to stop. OK, maybe you don’t end up on the floor of your shower, or maybe you do.
If you identified with any part of that description, than I’d say it’s a safe bet that you know a thing or two about anxiety. I also know you identify with anxiety because all humans feel it and, again I’m willing to make the assumption that if you’re listening…you’re one of us….humans I mean 😊Let us remember though that not all anxiety is bad. Anxiety is the reason you’ve survived up to this point. Well done! Our ancestors who felt anxious were more likely to survive. So, we are biologically programmed, primed to feel anxiety…for survival.
But realistically, how many times each day are you fighting for your physical safety? How many times are you truly in danger? If you’re like most of the people with access to podcasts and the technology and time to listen, you’re unlikely to be regularly facing physical threats to your safety. What causes the majority of our anxiety are the threats, real or imagined, to our emotional safety. We convince ourselves that some possible future occurrence is going to hurt our feelings. That may sound harsh but that’s what it is. We imagine a possibility and then we imagine the impact of that possibility. We alert ourselves to how bad it will be if that thing occurs.
We are actually able to convince our biologically conditioned anxiety prone brains that we are facing a real threat. So, what does our brain do? It prepares us to fight, for our survival. Or run, for our survival. Or freeze, for our survival. Or fawn, for our survival. Like storm clouds over the sea, the energy starts firing and connecting and our brains produce a flood of cortisol, adrenaline, noradrenaline, and a cocktail of other neurotransmitters designed, again, to help us survive. But that’s only helpful if we are actually threatened. If we’re not in a situation that allows us to expel all that energy that was created, we are left shaking and struggling to not feel crazy and broken. And most of us are doing this to ourselves over and over and over throughout every day and night. We are allowing made up stories of things that haven’t happened to create storms of toxic chemicals whose primary purpose is to help us survive, but we aren’t in danger!
So, the acid floats in our system until our amazing filtering processes can filter them out. And until that happens, we suffer from self induced torture. Tell me if this sounds familiar: after a long day of the regular ups and downs and trying to keep all the plates spinning, you finally get to lie down in the bed. Remembering how exhausted you’ve felt throughout the day, you’re just sure you’re going to fall asleep as soon as your head hits the pillow. But what happens instead? As you lie there waiting for sleep to overtake you, it’s almost like someone connecting the jumper cables to your brain and the energy starts pumping. It usually starts with something innocent and harmless like what to expect from the next day. Then the electricity spreads to any unresolved situations, or unanswered questions in your life. Before you know it, your body temperature starts to rise and the discomfort gets more and more significant. And as the clock starts to taunt you, you remember some breathing exercise you read about and you try to breathe through the anxiety. It’s not working. The breathing doesn’t slow down the string of seemingly unconnected thoughts that are now flowing through your mind. The breathing doesn’t stop the trembling, the crying, the fear that something is terribly wrong. The breathing isn’t enough because the storm clouds have already erupted and fired up your central nervous system. The train has left the station. You are primed for action but now is not the time for action, it’s the time for sleep.
Isn’t it interesting that the two most common times to experience anxiety are at the beginning and end of each day? Morning anxiety makes sense because our brains produce cortisol all the time ,and while we sleep, it doesn’t filter out as well because we’re not moving around, we’re sleeping. So it accumulates until our muscles work hard enough to push it back into the blood stream to be filtered out. If you experience morning anxiety, exercise big muscles as early in the day as possible. Jump out of bed and do 10-20 squats or pushups, and get that cortisol that has built up overnight moving again. It is the single most powerful thing you can do to work through morning anxiety. You can also keep paper and pen by your bed and start a practice of gratitude each morning before your feet even hit the floor. Gratitude is the medicine for self pity, and self pity is the cause of emotional dysfunction, so gratitude is the medicine for emotional dysfunction.
So, what about that nighttime anxiety? Well, that’s a little tougher to manage, especially once the storm has started. Darkness has strong associations and has always been a place open to the imagination and the projection of the fears. It’s when we feel the most alone. Maybe it was the lightning storm in the middle of the night, or that time you heard that weird noise but hid under your covers praying for safety. Maybe it’s all the times you’ve found yourself alone in the dark. Alone with your emotions. With the you that lives in you. Whatever your set of reasons, the night has power, and therefore, nighttime anxiety is best managed proactively rather than reactively, but we’ll talk about both.
So, what can you do proactively? The single most powerful proactive action you can take is to write things down. I’ve often imagined an eagle’s talons digging into my brain when a thought is stuck rattling around in my head. And when I write that thought down, it’s like the eagle releases me. Make notes for all the things you are trying to remember so that your brain doesn’t feel the need to make sure you remember. Allow the talons to release your mind.
Another powerful strategy is to do a brain dump before bed. You sit down just before bed and write down every single thing you can think of that could possibly worry you that night. Dump it all on the paper until you literally cannot think of anything else to worry about. Imagine scraping out every last worry like they were the seeds and guck inside a pumpkin. Scape it clean and then enjoy a good night’s sleep.
But what if these proactive approaches don’t help enough? What if the sleeping hours that are drip drip dripping away are too much and your mind starts jumping? And then the physical symptoms start? And it starts to feel like there’s a spring pushing your eyes open to allow for the full anxious experience? I can tell you that you are likely past the point where thought challenging and deep breaths are going to be enough to stop the storm. My answer is push ups, or some other strenuous exercise that requires big muscles to work hard. Remember, the feeling of anxiety is you being primed for action, so find a way to expel that energy. By the time you’re feeling physical symptoms, your brain has created so much energy that it’s really difficult to think away. So, get on the floor and do as many pushups as you can and then get back in bed, and when your heart slows, sleep will find you.
It’s always made sense that when I take my mental energy and push it out through the floor through physical exertion, it allows my brain to get back to baseline much faster. I always add this disclaimer when I talk about this topic because I don’t want it to sound like a one size fits all fix. When one of my sisters was experiencing anxiety the night before a big exam, she remembered my words of wisdom about the pushups. So, she did as many as she could and found herself still unable to sleep and her arms were so sore the next day that it made the exam even more challenging. So, each person has to find what works for them but I stand by the components that must be in place to successfully navigate our brain’s anxiousness in these situations.
Another strategy you can use to resist the doom and gloom of anxiety is to remember that anxiety usually only exists in the future, not the present. When feeling anxious, force yourself to step back into the present moment. You can do this by engaging with your immediate environment with any of your senses. In order to be in touch with any sensory experience, we must be focused on the present moment. So, our senses serve as our onboard anxiety reduction system. Use them!
And you know I couldn’t talk about anxiety without talking about the power of thought. If you notice that you are feeling anxious, you have to uncover the thoughts that are fueling that feeling. Change the thoughts, change the feeling. Write down the thoughts, challenge them. Turn them into rational statements that don’t cause anxiety. Ultimately, we are not responsible for what thoughts come into our minds, but we are responsible for what we do with them. Do we accept them without challenge, or do we take control over our experience of life and learn to control the narrative? My hope for you is that you take control, or keep control, of your story, and that I’m able to do the same.
Thanks for joining me for another session of Almost Therapy at the B Spot. Reminder that you can participate by emailing bhellercounseling@gmail.com. Tell me what’s going on, or what you’d like to hear about and I’ll be glad to talk about it. Who knows what the next session will be but hopefully you’ll join me for it. Until then, be well.
