Out of Anxiety - Part III - Management

When I began to scour the literature for a way out of the anxiety, I realized that nearly everything I found fell into one of four categories/steps: Management, Self-care, Confrontation, and Understanding Normalcy. Step one focuses on the two phases of management which are stopping the anxiety from growing and recasting your self-talk. The second step involves restructuring your life to create the conditions for mental health. The third step engages the anxiety in a discussion and fleshes out its root. The last step acknowledges that some anxiety in life is both normal and healthy, and that the experiences/feelings at the root of excessive anxiety are simply normal feelings that did not get “dealt with.”

Management

The techniques for management can be broken into two groups. The first group addresses the immediacy of the anxiety and its whirlwind-like habit. These exercises promote “grounding” or, to put it another way, getting out of the mind and into the world around you. Because so much of the material we use to build anxiety is only a perceived threat of annihilation, we can disable it by returning our focus to our physical body and environment. There are several exercises for this, but I found two particularly useful. In the first exercise you close your eyes, take a couple of slow, deep breaths into your abdomen and then open your eyes. With your eyes opened you begin listing out loud the things that you can see. (Mumbling under your breath is fine.) Stop at about 5 or 6. Next begin listing the things you can hear, again limiting it to about 5 or 6. Continue in the same way through feel, smell and taste. The last two are always a little harder, but no matter. If you need to, repeat the listing portion of the exercise until you feel more settled. The exercise looks something like this:

I see a telephone pole, a silver car, fallen leaves, a plastic pink flamingo, a muddy puddle. I hear rain drops hitting the roof, the fan on my computer coming on, the dog snoring, my own exhalation, a distant truck engine. I feel the uneven cushion of my chair, the warmth of the keyboard, my scarf too tight around my neck, the ache in my right knee, an itch on my elbow. I smell the wooliness of my sweater, the cool dry air. I taste coffee still on my tongue.

I also liked this breathing exercise. Breathe in to a count of five. Then see if you can seamlessly begin breathing out without there being a discernable stopping point to the breathing in. Breathe out for a long count of 5 to 7 and then breathe in, again without the stopping point. Continue this until you feel your chest relax and your breathing deepen into your abdomen. Sound silly? When under stress most of us will begin holding their breath. It’s instinct. Noticing your breathing will remind you to breathe. It will help to prevent the escalation of anxiety, hyperventilation and possible panic.

The second group of exercises provide a sort of counter-attack to the anxiety. First, assess your environment. Are you in physical danger? No. Then say, “I’m safe. Everything’s okay.” Are you being emotionally abused or attacked? No. You say, “I’m safe. Everything’s okay.” This might seem needless, but remember, you’re having an animal reaction. Tell the animal that annihilation isn’t imminent. Calm the animal first and it will begin to stand down.

The most effective technique is changing your self-talk. Self-talk is the voice you have in your head which feeds you with regular assessments and judgments of yourself and your environment. It is a trained feature of your mind, in other words, it can be taught to say different things. The inner self begins talking to us early on. Mother scolds her child for sneaking cookies from the kitchen. She smacks his hand and tells him he is a naughty, disobedient boy. The child, when next tempted to take a cookie, hears the voice in his head say, “Don’t take the cookie. There is a consequence.” Unfortunately, he also hears the judgment, “You are a naughty, disobedient boy who deserves to have his hand smacked.” This continues throughout our teen years and adulthood as we make judgments about ourselves in relation to family and social values. I do/want this, therefore I am this. Because I am this, I won’t be loved/provided for. I’ll be punished/judged/ostracized. You combat this type of self-talk by removing the negative judgment and creating a positive assessment based on what is normal rather than what is right. (And for the record, while being “right” is usually perfectly personifying one value or ideal, being "normal" covers a wide range.) Of course I wanted the cookie. I was hungry and I knew it would taste good. That’s very normal. Next time I will ask first.

This type of positive self-talk works with a host of situations and feelings. I have problems with depression, so no one who knows this about me will want me can be combated with I have a lot to offer another person besides my challenges. I am smart, funny, successful, responsible and caring. When I am ready and the right person comes along, I will find a lasting partnership.

Feelings of being unlovable as we are, of being found out as a fraud and of not deserving goodness in life, are all common. Targeting these internal judgments with positive self-talk specific to the issue is essential to sucking the wind out of the anxiety tornado. Remember to be kind and frank with yourself. I did the best I could in that situation with what I had at the moment. I have learned from my mistake and I am leading a healthier life now. It doesn’t take a psychologist to tell you these things. Imagine what you would say to your best friend and practice avoiding the word should.

Though it can take time for those messages to sink in, if you are consistent with providing them, eventually they will. Soon you will be able to talk yourself out of an anxiety attack just by telling yourself what the reality of the situation is. Beyond that point, your mind will begin to play those messages to you in times of stress without your having to consciously generate them every time.

The more often you do these exercises the sooner you will stop the anxiety when it arises and the easier it will be to identify the feelings and thoughts that are underlying. This is really important when you begin confronting the root of your anxiety.

Out of Anxiety - Part II - The Gift of Emotion

I’m not sure how it came to pass that emotions, especially those perceived as negative emotions, became a thing of demons. Maybe, as I mentioned in Part I, we have lost the social structure that supported our emotional health and now anything of feeling requires too much effort. Maybe it is best to simply not feel. Certainly there are many ways to get our chemical highs and stave off our lows—drinking, drugs, shopping, gambling, working ourselves to death—but that doesn’t replace or promote what could be a rich life of deeply felt emotions and connectivity.

Feeling and processing our emotions is the key to a strong underlying current of happiness. When we run from emotion, try to get out of feeling, we doom ourselves to carry our feelings with us until they are forced out by a mounting inner pressure, called out by a new, but similar experience, or we voluntarily release them by acknowledging them, experiencing them, accepting them and understanding them.

Many years ago, when I was consumed by a crazy anger, my good friend said to me, “Anger is a gift, Tiffany. What is your anger telling you?” What? Anger is a gift? All I wanted to do was get out of my anger, stop feeling it. Because I was so focused on not feeling it, I was missing something very important, the gift of my emotion. Emotions tell us crucial things about ourselves. They provide us with an opportunity to see deep into the psyche, to the heart of need, desire and longing. Carrying unexpressed emotions around takes a significant amount of energy. When we examine our emotions we are better able to refocus that energy toward the present, toward those things that provide growth and meaning to our lives.

There are lots of folks out there that will tell you that you aren’t a very spiritual or enlightened person if you feel and express your negative emotions. They say they base their opinions on the teachings of the Buddha or Jesus or Eckhart Tolle. But none of these great spiritual teachers say you should “get out” of emotion. Jesus, for instance, clearly expressed his emotions to his companions in the Garden of Gethsemane just before his crucifixion:

He took Peter and the two sons of Zebedee along with him, and he began to be sorrowful and troubled. Then he said to them, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death. Stay here and keep watch with me.” Going a little farther, he fell with his face to the ground and prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me. Yet not as I will, but as you will.” (Matthew 26:37-39)

Jesus is able to express his emotions, and then, feeling heard, he is able to move through those emotions and accomplish his purpose. The great mystic poet Rumi speaks of the value of emotion in his poem “The Guest House”. (See the poem in full by clicking on the link in the Cool Links sidebar.) When speaking of the value of emotion he says, “Welcome and entertain them all! Even if they're a crowd of sorrows, who violently sweep your house empty of its furniture.” In the end these emotions “may be clearing you out for some new delight.” He says that all of our emotions should be treated with respect because they are each “sent as a guide from beyond.”

In fact many of the great mystics experienced revelation and “the Source” by delving into emotion to find its root. Eckhart Tolle tells us that before we can begin seeing our emotions for what they are we have to be sure we are actually feeling our emotions. The repression of emotions is not an enlightened state. He says we have to practice just feeling emotions so that eventually we can step back from them a bit and identify where the energy of those feelings originates. (By the way, this applies to the “good” emotions as well.)

When I was a teen, a drug and alcohol therapist told me, “Tiff, emotions aren’t wrong; it’s what we do with them…” This echoes the instruction of great teachers such as Vimalakirti, Thich Naht Hahn, and Jesus who encourage us as part of our spiritual path to stop breaking up our lives into dichotomies such as good/bad and right/wrong and to simply focus on what is. It is so vital to living fully, and especially to recovering from excessive anxiety, that we stop categorizing our feelings. When we exalt one and demonize another, we lose sight of the fact that the gift of all emotions is the direction they provide us on our path toward wholeness. They show us where the work needs to be done in our lives.

Before any of that work can be done we have to accept that emotions are a gift. We have to recognize that we are having emotions even if we are not expressing them. We have to permit ourselves to feel and express them. Then, at last, we can understand them, and ultimately let them go.

The acceptance and processing of emotions is not easy for those of us battling anxiety, but diligence and practice will undoubtedly increase the speed with which you move through these steps. Be patient with yourself. Everyday you will have new “guests” trying to clear you out. And you will have the work of cleaning out the store of emotions from your past. This takes time.

As Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Tibetan Buddhist teacher and founder of the Shamabala Community, says, "It takes a long time to take our fences down. The first step is to learn to love ourselves, make friends with ourselves, not torture ourselves anymore."* This is the journey I’ve been on as I’ve sought to find my way through and out of anxiety. Emotion has been woven into every aspect of my anxiety. I have encountered emotions in every step as I have attempted to unravel it. I am grateful to my friends and husband who remind me to be patient even today as I pull apart the final threads.


*From Working with People in The Myth of Freedom