Are You Overindulging in Anxiety?
We all know the feeling...Your heart begins to pound, your muscles tense, your breath gets shorter, and a bead of sweat appears on your upper lip. You feel frozen in time and space. It’s crippling mostly because you feel you have no control. You must certainly be under attack. The thing is you look around but no one and nothing is there. You are alone, or are you?
Ahh, your old foe anxiety is here again. Your body is “practicing” the stress response. Your body is telling you there is something to fear. While your body’s stress response may have helped our ancestors avoid saber-toothed tigers in the past, today things are relatively safe and it is simply the mind and body “practicing” fear! I’m sure you are asking “ Practicing? Why would I practice something that awful?”. Let me explain with an example of my stress response gone wild.
Many of us live in a chronically activated nervous system.
If you watched my last Community Chat from April 29th you know that there was a shooting and a death one door down from our home, where I live with my seven-year-old son and my partner. This was a real event—as in, it actually happened and we witnessed it!! My heightened state of stress and anxiety was appropriate at that moment. There was most certainly something there to freak out about. But now every time I turn the corner to my home, my heart races and I can feel my chest tighten. There is no actual threat at that moment. My nervous system is triggered and it is now merely practicing my anxiety or stress response.
Dr. Joe Dispenza explains this really well, “In preparation for the next perceived threat, a person will think about some future worst-case scenario—based on a specific past memory—and will emotionally embrace it with such focus and concentration, that their body begins to believe that it is living in that future reality in the present moment. Why? Because the body “is” the unconscious mind. It does not know the difference between an actual experience in life that creates an emotion or when an emotion is created by thought alone. As a result, the body can get knocked out of homeostasis just by thinking.”
Anxiety is a normal emotional response toward unwelcoming situations. Anxiety is not synonymous with fear. Fear is a response to a real future event. However, anxiety is more often associated with an irrational fear of something or an event.
Moreover, the stress response can be activated in a perceived situation of physical harm as well as a confrontation with a coworker, the thought of the pile of bills you cannot pay, or a fight with your partner. The system just turns itself on! Anything you “think” is a reality to the body and can trigger this stress response. When repeated over time it can leave you in a perpetual state of anxiety — no real threat just never-ending crippling thoughts. If the crappy feeling of anxiety isn’t enough misery for you, this type of repetitive stress cycle has been linked to heart disease, obesity, diabetes, mood disorders, addictions, insomnia, and more.
So how does the stress response actually work?
Here is a quick need-to-know on the nervous system and the brain so your brain can put things in perspective and make sense of it all.
The nervous system is composed of two parts:
The central nervous system includes the brain and spinal cord
The peripheral nervous system
The central nervous system includes the brain and the spinal cord. The peripheral nervous system consists of nerves that branch off from the spinal cord and extend to all parts of the body. This is where they are, now here is what they do.
The main job of the nervous system is to transmit signals between the brain and the rest of the body, including the internal organs. We need the nervous system to move, breathe, think, etc.
Within the central nervous system, there are two parts and this part is really important to understand:
The sympathetic nervous system, (SNS)
The parasympathetic nervous system, (PSNS)
(PSNS) is the one that controls our rest and digest response The SNS the one that controls what is called our fight, flight, or freeze response. It gets us all revved up to fight, run or play opossum. Remember the saber tooth tiger story. The PSNS is like our chill zone. The place we get to in a hot bath or a good meditation. This is where we should be all of the time and turn on the SNS on a when necessary basis. In reality, the way we currently live is the other way around.
And now for the last part, the brain. This has three important parts:
The prefrontal cortex
Limbic system
Brain Stem
The prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that is in charge of executive functioning, problem-solving evaluation, etc —This is the thinking part. The Limbic system is how we store memories or how we relate episodic memories to emotions. This is essentially the stories we tell ourselves about what happened —The feeling part. The Brain Stem is the messenger of the brain’s story, sending all that information to the body itself, getting it to respond either by fight, flight or freeze, or rest and digest.
Okay, that's it. Pretty interesting stuff right? There is a real system here that’s happening behind the scenes in our unconscious. The trick is to make this system conscious. That's exactly where we are going! There is
a chain reaction that happens in the body that is initiated when you are in an actual threatening situation and a similar one when you or your nervous system is “practicing” anxiety/stress. I call this the anxiety wheel. It keeps repeating itself in a never-ending cycle. That is unless we do something about it.
A real threat
Scary thing happens
Your thinking brain responds
Your feeling brain stores the memory
Your nervous system is activated
Adrenaline is released
Heart pounds breath shortens
The scary thing goes away.
You go back to normal
A trigger or perceived threat
Something happens that reminds you of the scary thing
Your Feeling brain recalls the memory and sends the message as if it is happening now
Your nervous system is activated
Adrenaline is released
Heart pounds breath shortens
Since there is nothing there the memory repeats ( this is the practice part)
You are a mess
So what do we do?
These are the steps for a real threat and a perceived threat. Strikingly similar aren’t they? So what can you DO if you find yourself practicing the anxiety wheel? You can practice something I call “Feeling the Thoughts”. It’s a simple practice that stops the thought cycle by connecting you to your body. You begin to feel instead of think and this in effect breaks the cycle.
This is how I do it:
I notice my thoughts.
I remind myself that they are only thoughts
I draw those thoughts slowly into my throat
Then my chest
Then my tummy
Then I let them root me to the earth
By the time I get to step six, they aren’t thoughts at all. Just sensations. I have more of a feeling of being grounded and in control. When we can connect the body and mind consciously the unconscious reaction of the body stops and the system returns to its natural state of rest. This is very simple, but it works.
Take a look at this video to practice this exercise to reduce anxiety.
Life Design Book Club
Consider this your personal invite to join my Life Design Book Club! We are currently reading The Places that Scare You by Pema Chodron and discussing this text with anxiety in mind. We begin with meditation with discussion about the spiritual text with an understanding of how it applies to our life.
Join us for a deep dive into life changing books for 3 weeks on Saturdays at 9am EST or catch the recording in your member library.
Our next book will be the
The Untethered Soul and the will meet on May 13, May 20 and May 27
Learn more by taking a look at this video or register here:
