The baby cries, a boiling pot spills over, the dog pukes on the new carpet, the spouse was due home twenty minutes ago but work held them up, and another tornado warning flashes into your phone.
Whoosh, as Terry Real1 coins our automatic reaction to stress: you flee the scene, grabbing only dog and baby to take cover. Sweat bleeds from the brow, the heart races, and this time…this time, there is worry the tornado will rip through everything hard work has built.
Overstimulation abounds. And it’s getting harder and harder to distinguish between real or perceived stress.
Our brains are kindling— media outlets spreading the fire—making it harder to calm the bleep down.
Anxiety tramples over the human spirit the way wild animals stampede from a burning forest. Seems we have been living in a burning forest, twenty-four seven. And I’m not exaggerating – when we close our eyes, many of us struggle to produce the calming hormone melatonin, naturally, to lull us into calm and deeper states of rest. Our nervous systems struggle to reset, our thoughts race, and stress dreams remind us that if we do not address the anxiety during our awake life, it will haunt us overnight. We wake exhausted, overly tired – and the cycle continues.
I turned to a clinical expertise in anxiety shortly after I realized my quality of life was held hostage by it. It wasn’t the anxiety’s fault, per se. Anxiety was merely doing its job; part of me since birth, anxiety belongs to the human condition to maintain alertness and safety. Obvious in moments when my tears gave my baby tears, I struggled with an ability to communication with anxiety, not just be bullied. Basically, I became a hostage negotiator with my own thoughts.
Anxiety: Don’t leave the room.
Negotiator: But I’m hungry.
Anxiety: You don’t deserve to be seen in public. The grocery store is a social booby trap.
Negotiator: If you at least let me put on some leggins and a comfy t-shirt, and I won’t talk or make eye contact with anyone, can I go get some Pillsbury Crescent rolls?
Anxiety: Only if you share.
In the era of TMI and FYI and FOMO and ABCDQXYZ, the anxious parts of us (well intentioned to protect us)— have ramped in frequency with superhighway efficiency. Anxiety is merely a thought, feeling, sensation, action or absence of action during a period of elevated stress. The nervous system and the limbic system inside the brain work in tandem to shoot off signals and physical energy meant to aid in times of trouble. Shooting off too often or too intensely, our being hits debilitating snags.
Some people experience worse case scenario thoughts on rapid fire.
Some lose access to thought or words all together.
Some people sweat or feel like they are on the verge of cardiac arrest.
Some people get super sleepy.
Some people rage out.
Some people can’t stop talking and others refuse to speak.
For some, it is all of the above.
Since anxiety manifests in so many different ways – if one is not an expert or student of anxiety, you may have no idea what to blame for that time…you forgot the answers to an exam for which you studied hours, you couldn’t sleep, you blanked out at the dinner party, or when sweat drenched your pits despite an arctic freeze.
I’ll be walking you through best ways to tend to and reboot anxiety over the next couple of weeks. We’ll practice empowering ways to show back up and even enjoy yourself, not despite anxiety – rather, maybe because anxiety is trying to communicate what matters most to you and that perhaps a clear, confident, more consistent way of living is just what the mental health doctor order.
I am not just a clinician with this speciality, I am a lived experience expert on what it is like to run out of a room of people because I could not stop sweating, no longer accessing words to my native language.
Anxiety can be debilitating but with a few new angles and skills – you will both change your relationship with anxiety and your own freakin’ life for the better.
First Practice:
- Grab a writing utensil and journal or a trusted electronic notation system.
- Create two columns.
- Column one: label anxiety producing situations.
- Column two: label thoughts, feelings, and sensations you associate with anxiety.
We typically become aware of anxiety based on a situation or person, place, or thing precipitating it OR we have unique-to-us thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Next article (due out on Monday, September 11, 2023) – I’ll address the association between anxiety provoking situations, persons, places, and things and our anxiety provoked thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Learning about their relationship, we will learn to cope better with both – moving forward in the direction of your best life now!
- Real, T. Fierce Intimacy. Sounds True. 2018.
ANXIETY ANSWERS 