How do you think and view anxiety?
What is it?
The unknown future?
Worry over tomorrow, and the day after, and the next.
Overthinking, and rethinking.
You can research a lot about it, but most article’s give few straight answers on how to rid yourself of it. “Ok do this, and it’s gone.” The reason why is found through knowing what is it for and why we have it.
You are an ancient machine, evolved and developed over thousands of hundreds of years AND we are the end result of a very long line of survivors. . . so we are probably highly efficient. It is not an accident or a pathology that we have our emotional systems – including anxiety.
Anxiety has a purpose. It is there when we are uncomfortable in front of a challenge or situation, indicating there is something to do. How do we permanently get rid of an enemy? We make it our friend. This is what we need to do about anxiety. We need to stop pathologizing ourselves and realize at best we are co-controllers and need to work with these discomforts.
Sure anxiety is not a great friend and one we would like to leave our party as soon as they arrive – just drop off the gift. lt is a friend way too up in our business.
Our brain has one job and one job only. It is to keep your body alive. As such it is highly negative in its hardwiring. It is constantly on the look out for what is wrong. So, by detecting what is wrong – it can warn you and you can in turn remove yourself from or the harm itself. Our brain is exceptionally good at this. It can even be tricky.
Think of it like check engine on your car dashboard. The light goes off = no one gets excited about this. It sucks, its uncomfortable, but what to do about it? Cope with it? just get used to seeing it there. Fine. It will eventually work in a way because the light will burn out, but the problem will still be there. You can medicate – same as putting a post it over the light. Cool don’t see the light, but the problem is still there. The problem needs to be attendance.
Get under the hood and find out what the light was signaling needed attention.
Our subconscious takes in massive amounts of data. Too much for us to process consciously. Think – wiggle my big toe.Hopefully you thought it and you wiggled a big toe.Any idea how that happened? 63,000 some signals and electrical synapsis through countless nerves, bones, ligaments, and muscles that you and I both have no idea what they are called. WE just saw two steps. Thought it. wiggled it.Same with our scanning of the environment our subconscious always at work will find something odd and need to get our conscious attention. So it raises its voice in the dialogue by sending a signal through the use of the body.
Enter emotions.
Painful most of them and they get our conscious attention.
Now we are aware of the discomfort of the body and what then is anxiety there for. What is it bringing your attention to – the future? the unknown of tomorrow? I mean if it is, it has to get used to it, we don’t fully know what’s coming tomorrow. I know that what I attend to today will be the construct of my future. I know to a certain degree, what i’ll eat, where I will sleep how I react etc. Worries as such are smaller manifestations of anxiety formed from habit and a hyper vigilance to the dangers of the unknown and a deprived environment of scarcity. Perhaps a trauma response or perhaps your environment has had many dangers in it.
All anxiety boils down to some existential inevitability – an unavoidable part of the human condition. We can work with this in both a. practical way (alleviating the symptoms and the anxiety discomfort) while also spending time accepting and maybe even shifting our paradigm (the existential stuff – the under the hood stuff).
It isn’t just future unknowns we have to get accustomed to – it is certainties in it as well. Authorship of it, isolated aloneness in it, a lack of meaning in it, a bum deal in death – these things sound depressing, and – from other views – by becoming accustomed to them we are liberated from them.
In generalized anxiety there is a tendency to sense that you aren’t doing something with your life. Many clients come to me with this type of anxiousness.
For example, a client who had been dreaming about this car for a couple years, it was driving his goals, to finish school, get a good job to pay for it, and now he has it. What a relief it was to finally have it. But now… what does he do, it’s there now.
Can he enjoy the fruit of his labor and set his sight up on another aspiration. Perhaps this time setting it higher than the last time. He struggle with this idea and wondered if I meant like getting a house. He shared that right now, he didn’t want that. He didn’t want was next in the line of things that we are told we should want. He just wanted to live his happy life without this feeling anxious – that was his goal.
His feeling was telling him that in order for him to even get close to happy he would need to be set upon some purpose and meaningful ‘thing’ otherwise he was in a danger. IF he wanted to alleviate the anxiety then he would need to answer it by creating a roadmap for himself and his future. We don’t actually have to have an available answer right away. We can actually do our better to enjoy goodness of life right now as it presents itself. We will encounter and gain experiences and if we are alert (as we probably will be since we have active anxiousness about this) we will cross paths with something, some interest, some problem, and we will be drawn towards it – and driven by it. We don’t have to know right now. It is okay to not know.
In fact it is the exact right place to be – not knowing. It’s the only way we can start learning.
When it is said “process emotions”- This is what is meant by it – not just sitting in them and feeling them – but understanding them, accepting them as valid, and identifying why they are. They are active warning systems. Just like a smoke alarm. Its loud and uncomfortable to hear but gets our attention and gets us out the door before the smoke and the fire prevents us from doing so. Anxiety and the discomfort of the emotions will lift and pass when we are attending to their signal.
