What is anxiety?
I’ve seen anxiety defined a number of ways; most have these elements in common:
Anxiety is often characterized by intense, severe and persistent worry about common or specific situations. This worry often generates fear and a sense of dread, and results in strategies intended to avoid the situation, environment or person that triggers the worry.
For many, anxiety can seem to be irrational:
‘Why would someone be afraid to sit down at a table in the cafeteria with friends? What’s wrong with me?’
But if we see the fear as irrational, it’s tempting to just try and power through it. For some, that can work. For others, it won’t.
It’s my view that if we judge ourselves for having anxiety, it makes it harder to live with it — and manage it.
It’s been my experience that anxiety can actually be an important source of truth: if we listen carefully, it can be telling us something we need to be aware of. That doesn’t mean we should listen to it and avoid everything we are anxious about, but I think it does mean that if we listen to it, accept it, care for it and work with it, that we can feel more whole, complete, and empowered.
We may not easily understand what the anxiety or underlying fear comes from, but telling ourselves something isn’t real when it feels real may not help. At least, not without some careful preparation.
What I think can be helpful is to think of anxiety as a friend — a friend who needs to tell you something from time to time. If you listen carefully, you may find it’s easier to live and work with it.
I think there are four basic truths about anxiety:
- Anxieties and fears get created when something in our experience makes us feel unsafe;
- Once we feel unsafe in one situation, that sense of lack of safety can be triggered by other situations — and they don’t have to be the same as the original experience;
- We may not remember how anxieties got started, but we don’t necessarily need to; and, perhaps most importantly:
- Anxieties subside when we have the experience of safety.
Anxiety isn’t just a feeling of dread, fear or apprehension: it can be a physiologic state. When we feel anxiety, our body moves into its ‘fight or flight’ chemistry, and we can often feel the results: faster breathing, sweating, and so on. When it gets to that point, it can be really hard to calm ourselves down; that’s why leaving the situation that’s triggering the anxiety feels so important.
And I don’t mean to suggest we can simply calm ourselves down and have anxiety go away on the spot. Self-regulation techniques can be really important and helpful, but I also think that how we think of, view and interact with our anxious selves is important, too. I don’t mean to suggest that our anxious self is really apart or separate from whom we are; it’s clearly not. It’s part of us, but perhaps it’s a part we don’t know how to relate to or understand.
What I’ve seen that can be very helpful is to work on developing a healthier relationship with the anxious parts of ourselves. By that I mean that, in present time, we get to know the parts of ourselves that are anxious, and develop or establish a loving, supportive and empathetic relationship with those places within us.
I’ve got some thoughts about how to do that. Perhaps they will work for you or someone you care about.