Anxiety is part of us. This is often my first lesson to clients; built into our brains to show up when we care and fear.
Care: Safety. Fear: Mortality.
Care: Self-image. Fear: Judgment.
Care: Point of View. Fear: Teased or Outcasted.
Care: Purposefulness. Fear: FOMO.
Our WHOLE HEALTH runs along a mind and body path, both feeling the vibrations of anxiety. However, there is growing evidence (ie, research in areas like Polyvagal Theory) that our beings can redirect the intensity of anxious episodes through health habits and choices. 1
When care and fear chimes vibrate throughout our brain and nervous system, a domino like clanking pulls for our attention. Thoughts, feelings, and physical sensations try to communicate a pending collapse of functioning long before major health alarms go off.
But too few of us listen to the WHOLE HEALTH aspects of anxious communication. Too many of us stuff the communicators into a back pocket and proceed with our day(s) according to shoulds or rigid routines.
Have a thought the movie everyone wants to see may be too intense for you? You go anyhow. And the popcorn spills all over your spooked pants.
Have a feeling of dread that you do not understand the material for an upcoming exam? And you ignore this, never asking for extra help. The result is a poor test score.
Have a sensation of tightness in your chest every time you attend a loud weekend party? Now you’re sleepless every Saturday night from the overstimulation in your body.
WHOLE HEALTH anxious communicators resemble your mama. They intend to help yet we often snark back, “Leave me alone,” needing to learn experientially for ourselves.
Fine.
But please parent or, at least, observe to yourself: chronic fatigue, insomnia, tense chest and tingling digits; avoidance or fixation, dread, low confidence; packed schedules or its cousin – sleeping the day away, lost connection with friends, and persistent people pleasing. These low grade aspects of WHOLE HEALTH – try to tell us how we’re doing in three main areas of well being – OUTLOOK, CIRCUMSTANCES, AND PHYSICAL WELLNESS.
If we tend to the communicators of thoughts, feelings, and sensations – getting curious rather than dismissive – we learn a lot in an efficient way about how we wish to be living.2
Curiosity is not the same as fixating. In the former, we wonder if a thought, feeling, or sensation has merit and productive information for how best to be living our lives. Fixating on any one thought, feeling, or sensation – we tend to zoom in on the tree of health and miss the overall forest. For instance: if we become so overwhelmed by not understanding one section of material for an upcoming exam – we fixate on the one area that may not be suited to our brain’s understanding – and we’d miss out on the chance to do well overall on the test had we brushed up on the material that came more naturally.
While it is important to learn how and why not to fixate on any one thought, feeling, or sensation – when it comes to our general health, too many of us ignore early communicators and we therefore end up with bigger problems down the road.
ANXIETY ALARMS: when thoughts, feelings, or sensations are ignored, we miss ample information to aid our WHOLE HEALTH effectively. Take a common situation of thoughts that heading to the same employer day-after-day despite inner dialogue, “My boss is a bully.” Maybe you’re an anxious people pleaser and you try to do all you can in order to avoid becoming a target of their rants. Maybe you decide to override the thought and imagine all bosses are like this.
Go on.
Keep showing up, overriding or ignoring the bully thought.
Then, one day, ignored long enough – it collides with stress in your WHOLE HEALTH, your WHOLE HEALTH ANXIETY ALARMS blast.
EXAMPLES OF WHOLE HEALTH ANXIETY ALARMS: Low grade thoughts, feelings, and sensations – eventually implode or explode.
ANXIETY ALARMS
- chronic back pain
- sleeplessness
- persistent irritability
- avoiding life / leaving the house
- panic attacks that feel like heart attacks
- lashing out at loved ones
In example with our circumstances, the thought of how mean a boss is to everyone becomes distracting and tenses us up enough that your work flow, quality, and performance suffers. Many get scolded for acute loss of productivity from said bully boss. Maybe you walk off the job – as I did – with tears accompanying, “I am taking a personal day…” then you head home to write that imminent need for resignation. Maybe you have no other job lined up because you’ve been in survival mode…and there’s an immediate need for an escape route from the extremely loud alarm.
In your outlook, ignored thoughts of mistreatment by an employer or family member start to resemble a spike in anxiety or general sense of being on edge alongside a growing hopelessness. Eventually, you struggle to get out of bed each morning and start to ask those big questions like: WHAT IS THE MEANING OF LIFE?*
In your physicality, ignored thoughts tend to shift into routinely getting sick or canceling plans because you feel exhausted. Your digestion gets sluggish or spasm-hyper, and you’re so tense it’s hard to figure out how-the-bleep to sleep. You’re running on caffeine, yet your word access or energy resembles an empty tank of gas.
WHAT IS WHOLE HEALTH? WHY IT MATTERS?: Our WHOLE HEALTH is a three part organizational system to inventory how we generally interpret our lives (OUTLOOK), how we spend our days (CIRCUMSTANCES), and the quality of the ship that navigates the days of our lives (PHYSICALITY). It’s a mashup I have constructed from WHOLE HEALTH living practices.3
Tending to our WHOLE HEALTH, we simultaneously tend to our WHOLE ANXIETY NETWORK.
Tending to our WHOLE HEALTH, we simultaneously tend to our WHOLE ANXIETY NETWORK. Taking OUTLOOK, CIRCUMSTANCES, and PHYSICALITY as an indicator of how we are doing – we have tangible tools, like puzzle pieces to our WHOLE HEALTH.
We can pop these pieces out, look at them as their own singular piece and find ways to optimize how each area is doing. When we tend to these parts, the BIG PICTURE of lives will appear clearer and most radiant, too. Ignoring the thoughts, feelings and sensations that tell us how each of these categories are – we may be left with cloudy or missing pieces that weaken our big picture.
This week, take a moment to draw a three-leaf Venn diagram.
Label one leaf: OUTLOOK, another: CIRCUMSTANCES, and another: PHYSICALITY.
Next to each leaf, please bullet point thoughts, feelings, and sensations of your body for each of these areas.
IE, OUTLOOK.
- I think today will be hard.
- I think I can take things one step at a time.
Start with bullet pointing your thoughts, feelings, and sensations. Try not to judge your initial download. In time, we can realize that – as in the above example – the second bullet point is a healthy thought for a positive outlook…and drumroll, improved ANXIETY RELIEF and WHOLE HEALTH.
In the coming weeks, I’ll be sharing tips on how to heal or optimize our WHOLE HEALTH via productive actions or positive thinking formations for each of our WHOLE HEALTH areas.
After all, the better our WHOLE HEALTH, the smoother the ride and fewer panicked bumps in the road. In other words, as we grow our WHOLE HEALTH in physicality, say, with productive actions to ie, lessen our sugar intake on the daily – we may also lessen overall frequency and intensity of anxious spikes. Similarly, if we nip a thought that we need to be constantly busy in order to feel good about oneself, we can start to revamp specific tasks that do make us feel our best, deliberately seek time for joy and fun, and ultimately have a healthier lifestyle.
Stay tuned and stay attuned to the flow of your WHOLE HEALTH.
*though, if introspective, you may tend to ask this question — as I do — as a hobby,
- Porges, S. The Polyvagal Theory. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3108032/#:~:text=The%20polyvagal%20theory%20proposes%20that,of%20behavior%20and%20psychological%20experience. Accessed 31 October 2023.
- Davies, K. The Intelligent Body. Norton & Co. 2017.
- National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine; Health and Medicine Division; Board on Health Care Services; Committee on Transforming Health Care to Create Whole Health: Strategies to Assess, Scale, and Spread the Whole Person Approach to Health; Meisnere M, South-Paul J, Krist AH, editors. Achieving Whole Health: A New Approach for Veterans and the Nation. Washington (DC): National Academies Press (US); 2023 Feb 15. 2, Defining Whole Health. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK591719/ accessed 31 October 2023.
ANXIETY ANSWERS 