Being Emotional (and Mindful) In The City

Jonathan Kaplan, Ph.D., who writes in his Urban Mindfulness blog for Psychology Today, draws a comparison between the hustle and bustle of city life, and how frenetic our emotional life can become.

If you’ve ever spent time in Chicago, or New York, the analogy is spot on. Sometimes my brain feels like “the city that never sleeps,” and aside from not being able to get a hot dog on the street when I can’t sleep at 3 AM, city life and emotional experiences can often seem very similar.

Kaplan suggests that mindfulness can be beneficial in dealing with those times where the pace of our emotions becomes so rapid that our brain feels like Times Square on New Years Eve.  When we take time to become more aware of thoughts, actions, and physical feelings associated with emotions, we can put a little distance between the emotion itself and everything else.

For people prone to anxiety, it’s often difficult to separate what we’re feeling from the circumstance we’re in. Our cues are off, sometimes a little, and sometimes a lot. One of the things that’s been helpful for me is to realize that I don’t always see things as they are, so I’ve learned to take cues from people around me. How are they reacting? If they aren’t loading the kids into lifeboats, or sending the soldiers to the wall to repel an invasion, there’s a good chance that my initial reaction is based on bad cues, and I should probably trust that all is well. Being present in the moment, rather than worrying about the past or projecting into the future, is enormously beneficial.

Kaplan writes:

Become better aware of the triggers for anger–both externally and internally. Being in a hot, crowded place is  stressful and can often provoke anger, for example. Similarly, there are particular “trains of thought” that can lead to anger, such as focusing on “what’s right” (or the way things “should” be) or personalizing what people do or say (e.g., “he did that awful thing to me on purpose”). Once you know these triggers, you can prepare for them. You can avoid being in the subway during rush hour or make a point to take off your coat or scarf. Similarly, you can question your automatic thoughts in response to a situation. Maybe the cab driver didn’t cut you off maliciously. Maybe he simply didn’t see you and made an honest mistake.

There’s nothing wrong with taking cues from others. As we grow from an infant to an adult, one of our primary learning tools is observation – watching what others do, and imitating.

You’re never too old to watch and learn.

Being Emotional (and Mindful) in the City

Anxiety Disorder Self-Tests

Anxiety Disorders Association of America has a web page with links to self-tests for various types of anxiety disorders.

It’s a very simple, radio-button type of survey, not entirely useful because it stops short of being a diagnostic tool, suggesting that when you click all of the applicable buttons, you print the result and take it to your health care professional. DOH!

But for people who are interested in some of the symptomology associated with the myriad kinds of anxiety disorders, it’s a handy collection if you’re into lists.

Anxiety Disorder Self-Tests

What to Fear?

I’ve spent a good bit of my adult life playing “worst case scenario”, even when circumstances didn’t necessarily call for it. Do any of these sound familiar to you?

• Taking a seat in an airplane before takeoff, I look around to pick my primary and secondary escape routes while gauging how difficult it might be to lower my shoulder and linebacker that big guy in the Armani suit if he gets between me and the door in the unlikely event of a water landing.
• Sitting in traffic, I leave a little room between my car and the one in front of me, just in case I need to make a quick escape if a carjacker walks up or someone starts shooting from across the street.
• While driving down the highway next to a gasoline tanker truck, I speed up a little to get in front of it, because it sure would suck to be alongside the truck if it happened to explode for some reason.

When there’s something broken in your fear and anxiety wiring, these sorts of compensating behaviors don’t seem odd at all. It’s simply a way to deal with irrational emotion and assert a certain amount of control into a situation where, in reality, you have absolutely no control at all.

So it was with great interest that I read an article by John Goekler that discusses how we’re inundated by the media and polling with data about who the most dangerous people in the world might be, when statistically and actuarily, the most dangerous person in the world is the one who looks back at you in the mirror each morning.

According to the US Department of Health and Human Services, between 310,000 and 580,000 of us will commit suicide by cigarette this year. Another 260,000 to 470,000 will go in the ground due to poor diet and sedentary lifestyle. And some 85,000 of us will drink to our own departure.

The things we fear most are usually the things that happen the least. Therefore, the time, energy, and resources we invest in trying to be safe from them are a complete waste. When was the last time you heard a terrorist car bomb go off, or had anthrax mailed to you, compared to the last time you caught the flu or some infection from a co-worker?

Security is an illusion. The sooner we understand that we’re never really safe, and we begin to invest time and energy in dealing with how we react to that instead of trying to control our family, friends, and environment, the sooner we’ll begin to enjoy the wonderful things the world has to offer if we are brave enough to poke our head out and look around.

The Most Dangerous Person in the World?