Anxiety
Some Truth about Anxiety
The trouble is that Nature wants you to be anxious. I’ll always be real with you: it designed you that way. And recognize that we live in a culture where everything is telling us we’re meant to be happy, even ecstatic a good 70-80% of the time. This is crazy and misleading. We’re all being set up to feel bad about something that’s quite normal by design, and that’s if things are working right. Not everything works right all the time.
I’m writing words for questions like: Why I am anxious? How can I cure my anxiety? How does anxiety work? How can I get rid of anxiety? These feel like doors to a forever conversation I’ll always be having in work and life.
Back to Nature. Nature is a lot of things, a lot of extremes. Nature is the beauty of a sunset or the resilience of hummingbird migration. Nature is also a tornado ripping a town to shreds. Nature is the cycle of life and death, it is both kind and cold. It’s all of this physical world. Nature is balance, imbalance, and the inevitable move into new balance. Anxiety is natural, it’s part of Nature’s design. Anxiety, on its own, is neither bad nor good. Yes, sometimes anxiety is bad, or perhaps better put, non-functional. But, psychopaths don’t have social anxiety, for instance, so it’s also an important ingredient.
I’m serious about the psychopaths bit, by the way. And congratulations, you’re not one of them! (Psychopaths couldn’t be bothered with articles on anxiety.)
When it’s working, Anxiety propels our individual survival and protects the propagation of the species. Nature developed us over tens or hundreds of thousands of years through hunter/gatherer society, and for millions of years before that. Today, we live in an ironically strange world of our own creation, often disconnected from the conditions that produced us, but our hard-wiring is still from Nature. As such, Anxiety is the original mechanism that helps us do 3 things:
Look out for lions, tigers, and bears.
Not get kicked out of our group.
Be able to bag the last antelope.
Anxiety is a very serious thing because originally the threats wanted to eat us. And, let’s be real, there are still plenty of places in the modern world where danger can kill or can permanently harm. Even if our world is secure and safe, our bodies and minds were forged by these levels of risk. It’s like we all have a little PTSD built right in.
In hunter/gatherer societies, if a person were ostracized for transgressing the major norms or rules of their group, they generally died. Some died from the emotional impact of being shunned. Some died from the physical hazards outside the safety of the group. It’s no wonder, is it, that social anxiety is a thing, even if we can move on, make new friends, get a new job, or move to a new school?
And the last point, bagging the antelope, is what helps us study for a test or win a soccer game in today’s world. When it all comes down to one moment, we have a mechanism that helps us bring ourselves to focus.
Yes, Anxiety can become non-functional. It can take on a life of its own and start telling us what we can and can’t do to the point where we can’t do things others do without thinking. That can make us feel hopeless. It can become terrible. But you get my point: Anxiety has a value. We were designed to have it. People without it are certifiably dangerous. Even if it’s got out of control, you’re not crazy; it’s about bringing it back into balance.
Anxiety is an emotion we have to process as we would any other information. It’s compelling information because it changes our breathing, it affects our guts, it can make us sweat or even throw-up. But all of that, as un-ignorable as those responses are, are interpretations of what is happening. Are they accurate interpretations? We have to use our thinking brain to sort that out. All feelings are valid, in that we’re feeling them. However, not all feelings are accurate, which is actually a big relief.
A rustle in the bushes, outside, in the dark will make your heart lurch. You may imagine a bear, to find it’s just the neighbors’ cat. I suppose it seems easy if it’s not really a bear, but even the fear of throwing up in a job interview is a chain reaction of imagination, anticipatory thoughts, and physical systems spooling up an ancient survival reflex to make you puke to give a bear something to eat while you run away. You can learn to redirect the automatic, ancient survival trigger that is getting ready to blow. You can slow your breathing, deepen your breathing, you can focus on thoughts other than fear and embarrassment. And if you’re not ready for the interview, you can become ready through training and exposure to lesser forms of the same stressors until you are ready.
But here’s the kicker: with training and exposure, do not plan to not feel anxious. That is never going to happen. I wish it were otherwise, but we’re hard-wired to feel anxious. You’re in a job interview and your body’s still responding to bears! What you will find through training is your resilience grows. You start to believe in yourself where before you felt out of control. You’ll start to see that you feel stronger. You will develop mastery. The anxiety will be about the same, but somehow you won’t care so much. You used to be afraid of the dark when you were younger. Now you’re not. The dark is just the same, but you have grown. You’ll start to joke about what makes you anxious. You’ll start breaking the rules Anxiety used to place on you. You’ll start to make your own decisions again, and Anxiety will find its place, once more, working for you and not running your show.
Be really careful not to retreat. If you hole-up at home and don’t push yourself, the Anxiety will get bigger and bigger with every opportunity you surrender to make it go away. If you turn and face it, it will shrink. It will feel uncomfortable, but it will shrink. If you run, it will grow.
There are lots of ways to think about Anxiety. But, the most important thing is that you and your anxiety are not the same thing. Anxiety is an emotional instrument to evaluate the world around you to be examined and tweaked. Anxiety is not your personality, it is not your identity. Sometimes it ends up like air traffic control radar which is set too high. If you have radar, you want to be able to see the planes in the sky. If your radar is picking up every dust mote floating in space, your screen whites-out and you’re as good as blind. It takes some time and training to recalibrate your radar so that it ignores the things not worth noticing. It takes time, but moving back into balance is natural, which is how you were designed to be.
