NY Times: Taking Anxiety to a New Level

The New York Times has a posting in their Fashion and Style section on anxiety. Who knew that my psychological disorder was either stylish, fashionable, or both?

The author experiences some knee-knocking while looking over a cliff at Big Sur and notices that as she gets older, she’s much less inclined to engage in activities that involve elevation. She claims to never have been afraid of heights before, but now, at 47, altitude causes her anxiousness.

From a clinical perspective, as one gets older, we lose some of our mobility, and our confidence in being able to handle some of the physical demands as well as we did in our youth can wane. But is that anxiety?

From the article:

There is a difference between a fear and a phobia, of course. The people at the Anxiety Disorders Association of America will tell you that we all have things that scare us, after all. It’s when fears start limiting our behavior that they become the kind of full-fledged anxiety-producing phobias that afflict more than 19 million people nationwide. That’s more than 8 percent of the adult population, and the only reason I agreed to hike on the headlands trail in the first place was to keep myself from joining them.

So she takes to nature so she doesn’t have to join our ever-growing group of anxiety sufferers? Really?

I think there’s a big difference between fear and anxiety. Standing on the edge of a craggy cliff that juts out over the ocean is the kind of thing humans learned to stay away from, because experience reminded us of the time when Urg the caveman did that and plunged to his death. Our self-survival mechanisms kicked in, and over time it became ingrained in us to avoid doing silly things like that. It reminds me of a cat that sits on a hot stove. He never sits on a hot stove again – but he never sits on a cold one, either.

I’m guessing that the writer was trying to be cute and draw comparisons between loafing at Big Sur and having a panic attack for no discernible reason, but I’m not buying it. We don’t have the choice to avoid our everyday lives like she can avoid Big Sur, or an expensive dinner at a rotating restaurant at the top of some tall building.

Please don’t use anxiety for alliteration purposes, especially if you don’t understand what it is. A couple of quotes tossed in from authoritative anxiety sources doesn’t help explain how crippling anxiety disorders can be, and equating them to being afraid of falling into the ocean do nothing to educate the general public about a very real, very serious illness.

Image via Wikimedia Commons – Dysepsion

Welcoming and Releasing Emotions

Urban Monk has a powerful piece on the practice of dealing with our emotions rather than living a life of avoidance. As noted in the article, we tend to avoid people and situations that cause us pain and discomfort, because why put yourself in those situations if you don’t have to?

In our internal world, however, that does us more harm than good. It isn’t until we’re willing to face our pain and troubling thoughts that we begin to understand them and work through them to obtain a measure of peace.

The three steps outlined in the posting – awareness, relax into the raw emotion, and bypassing the mind, are pretty familiar to anyone who has ever experienced exposure therapy or engaged in any sort of meditation. From my perspective, it can be boiled down into one word – feel.

When we choose to feel, rather than think, rationalize, intellectualize – insert your favorite -ize here – we’re getting down to our raw base. Some people call it inviting the emotion in, and they facilitate it by naming what they are feeling out loud.

Pain, come in and walk around – I won’t push you away or hide from you. I’ll let myself be awash in you. All creatures feel pain. It’s okay.

Sadness, my old friend, good to see you again. Come sit with me and get soggy from my tears as I allow myself to acknowledge your presence and understand that it’s normal to feel you. You don’t last forever.

Fear, you’re intruding into my life, as you often do, so rather than wrestling with you, fighting and grappling in an intellectual cage match, I’m going to let you swirl around a bit, knowing that you have no stamina, and that you will soon pass and allow me to focus on more meaningful things.

It can be difficult to embrace and understand your emotions if you’ve been avoiding them for a time. In addition to how you react in your brain, what physical symptoms do various emotions cause?

Muscle tension is a good one for fear or panic, along with rapid pulse, increased rate of breathing, perhaps some dizziness or disorientation. Recognizing them, calling them out, is a good way to label them for what they are – physical manifestations of emotional reaction, temporary in nature, and not indicative of anything else. No pending heart attack or stroke, just your body physically reacting to emotions that you haven’t spent much time with lately.

My experience has been that once I welcomed these emotions, embraced them, named them, understood them, and let them flow through me, two distinct patterns emerged. First, the racing mind and physical symptoms tended to be less severe and the amount of time they lasted became less and less. Secondly, I found myself  with less apprehension about them when there was a possibility that they would occur. Since I knew what they are, what they did, and that I was able to acknowledge and embrace them, they lost all mystery and negative connotation. In the words of our friends from The Sopranos, it is what it is.

So I encourage you to stop avoiding your emotional side and send it an invitation to sit down for a chat. Buy it a cup of coffee or an herbal tea. Know that viewing your emotions as a necessary part of yourself that’s needed to make you a whole being should make it easier to make friends with your emotions, and learn to benefit from the lessons they hold.

We don’t always need to think and analyze and dissect. Sometimes, it’s best to just sit back and feel.

Core Practice: Welcoming and Releasing Emotions, via Urban Monk

Take Responsibility for Your Happiness

In previous postings, I’ve alluded to The Art of Happiness, a tome of collaboration between the Dalai Lama and psychologist Howard C. Cutler, M.D.

The most revealing passage from the book was something Dr. Cutler noted – that in canvassing his colleagues in the psychiatry field, none had ever noted “being happy” as a therapy goal. That seemed telling to me, because once you move away from the tactical treatment of various conditions and issues, shouldn’t being happy be the ultimate goal?

So, if doctors and therapists aren’t putting happiness on your To-Do list, how do you get there? The short answer is to take responsibility for your own happiness. But that seems like a daunting task. How does one go about charting a course to happiness?

Urban Monk has an enlightening piece (pun intended) by guest blogger John J. Patton that examines this very topic. In a section titled A Light Unto Yourself, Patton lays out some very simple and easily managed rules of the road for taking charge of your own happiness. As in most things of a Buddha nature, everything revolves around being accountable and responsible on your own, instead of looking toward outside forces to provide what you are seeking.

Here are a couple that resonated with me:

I value my inner peace more than I do winning, defending my identity, proving my point, or reactively expressing momentary emotions.

I understand that my feelings are natural, and so make no apologies for them.

I make plans for the future, but remain open in order to respond to each moment directly.

I learn from the past, but do not allow it to interfere with the present.

Though I cannot always control my thoughts, I can control which ones I pursue and give energy.

Patton’s list is a must-read for anyone who is ready to take advantage of the massive power that lies within the self. If you haven’t added being happy to your list of goals and objectives, perhaps now is the perfect time. If so, Patton’s piece is an excellent way to kick off your journey.

A Light Unto Yourself / In Case of Emergency , via Urban Monk

Living a Happy, Anxious Life

Paul, over at AnxietyGuru, asks the question, “Can You Live A Happy Anxious Life?”

It’s an interesting question, and I had to sit down for awhile and think about what my answer would be.

Paul posits:

Relative happiness is the kind you get when you buy something, say shoes or a motorcycle or whatever. It is temporary and subject to the whims of external change. Whereas inner happiness is yours no matter what, like all those fabulous bits of information you learned in school that you can’t use anywhere else, but yours they are.

I’m talking about inner peace and happiness. Now, admittedly you can be a Buddhist monk and never get there, but you can if you try. The fact that you can try should be, I hope, a signal that you can do more to be happy than you’re doing right now.

Dictionary.com has the following entry under happy:

1.         delighted, pleased, or glad, as over a particular thing: to be happy to see a person.

2.         characterized by or indicative of pleasure, contentment, or joy: a happy mood; a happy frame of mind.

3.         favored by fortune; fortunate or lucky: a happy, fruitful land.

4.         apt or felicitous, as actions, utterances, or ideas.

5.         obsessed by or quick to use the item indicated (usually used in combination): a trigger-happy gangster. Everybody is gadget-happy these days.

Anxiety, by the very nature of its presence, makes it difficult to achieve #3, since we anxious folk are generally skeptical of fortune or luck. But if we use #2 as our guiding light, which is what I think Paul was doing, then the answer is a resounding yes.

One of the very best things I learned in my treatment was to acknowledge and embrace the reality that things happen that are out of my control, and all of those years of pre-planning and proactive worrying didn’t change that a bit. It certainly gave me the illusion that nothing would go wrong, or if it did, I would be able to rapidly respond to the crisis. But it burned up energy and time for no good reason.

The downside of that – well, there were scores of downsides, but this is one of them – was that I was never in the moment during those times, because my mind and my emotions were perpetually skewed toward scanning the horizon for the next bad thing.

Once I began to let myself be present in the moment and feel the emotion that was appropriate for that snapshot in time, it became much easier to feel happy in an enjoyable way, not in the “if I let myself feel joy or peace, it will be crushing when it ends, because it always does” manner of my high anxiety years.

So when I stop to think about the things that make me happy, it’s much easier now to have clarity around what that means. I find great joy in time spent with my family, and I now allow this sense of calm, contentment, and happiness to wash over me like a waterfall, soaking me for as long as possible. Will this moment end, and will I eventually dry off again? Of course. But for that moment, that hour, that day, I’m drenched and soggy, which feels so much better than before.

I would call out these instances, these events, as reminders of my happiness, not happiness itself. I’m not engaged in some zero-sum game anymore, where I need to track and measure my level of joy, peace, and tranquility. I’m just me, a pretty happy guy, who often gets reminded of my happiness by people, places, and things. Other times, things don’t go as well, and rather than dwell on that, I seek out those very same people, places, and things that I know will keep me going until the dark cloud of anxiety passes over me.

No Holding Back the Tears

Wednesday night was “graduation” night at my son’s Montessori school, where parents, grandparents, friends, and family pack into the gym and celebrate educational milestones such as moving from kindergarten to lower elementary, lower elementary to upper, becoming big-kids-on-campus by heading to middle school, and finally, the 8th graders departing as they head out for their high school experience.

It’s nice that they celebrate important transitions such as these, and it really builds a sense of community and continuity. The mere fact that an eight year old wants to go sit in the gym for an hour for this demonstrates how much the kids benefit from the event.

Using Weather to Teach a Child About Fear

My eight year old son – we’ll call him Sam – has inherited his Dad’s fascination with weather.

From his earliest days, when he could barely hold his head aloft, he would swivel in the direction of the magical TV box whenever the weather radar would come on the screen, or if he heard the computer-generated voice that gave the NOAA forecast superimposed over the map on our local weather channel.

Living in central Ohio, severe weather in the form of terrible thunderstorms and tornado watches is common. The combination of flat, open spaces and cold fronts often churns up the atmosphere, which means the local weathermeisters frequently interrupt regularly scheduled programming to jam their Super Nexrad Doppleganger Accu-Panic 4000 in our faces as they chart the speed and direction of the forthcoming swath of probable doom.

For Sam, there’s really only two things he knows about a tornado. First, they destroy homes and kill people, as evidenced by the video played and replayed ad nauseum on said TV box. Secondly, they are talking about tornado watches or warnings where he lives. Fear and panic set in, and Sam believes a tornado is heading through our subdivision, as the sky is dark and the wind is blowing where he is.

It’s senseless to explain to a pre-teen that the odds of dying in a tornado are roughly 1-60,000, or that he stands a much better chance of death by falling down (1-246) or via an air travel accident (1-20,000). That’s the thinking brain approach, and he’s not responding intellectually. His reaction is an emotional one, generated by the feeling brain. And he’s not alone. The vast majority of adults have exactly the same reaction. Even though the odds of dying of heart disease are 1-5, we still eat butter, cheeseburgers, and chips. There’s little trepidation about hopping in the car even though statistics tell us there’s a 1-100 chance of dying in a crash.

We watch news reports of horrific storms and stare at video of the carnage, and listen to sobbing testimonials from families surveying their destroyed homes, or townsfolk eulogizing the lost.  That personalizes the event in our minds and keeps it in the forefront of our memory. It’s difficult for us to recall the hundreds of tornado events each year that don’t cause death or serious injury, but our mind can quickly flash on examples of video and still photos taken from news reports and print media that document the worst scenarios. So when “tornado” hits our conscious mind, viola! Terrible event, death and destruction, risk alarm clangs loudly, fight or flight kicks in.

Between 1976 and 2000, the mean number of yearly tornado fatalities was 54. From 1912 to 1936, the mean number was 260, almost 5 times as many. So the risk has decreased substantially. But you wouldn’t know that because modern communications keeps the 54 foremost in our minds.

So how do you teach a child to not be afraid of a tornado?

I do it by telling him that in my 48 years on this planet, I have never seen a tornado, smelled a tornado, or lived anywhere that a tornado hit. He can connect with that – and there’s trust and credibility built in that no amount of statistical information can approximate. We also talk about what to do if one does happen to head our way. We know exactly where in the house we’re going to go and what we’re going to do, so he feels empowered in his situation. It’s no longer abstract – more than 17,000 days have passed without Dad experiencing a tornado, so it must be pretty darned unusual.

Then we eat healthy foods (mostly), always wear our seat belts, and change the batteries in our smoke detectors. Because I don’t want Sam to be fearful like me. I want him to live his life by paying attention to the important things while being somewhat resistant to the fear culture that’s developed.

Who knows. He might even grow up to be a storm chaser.

Worry is Emotional Avoidance

Robert Leahy, Ph.D., writing in Anxiety Files, suggests that worry is all about language rather than images. We prefer thinking over feeling. We do that to avoid emotion.

Now, I’m a visual person. That doesn’t mean you can see me – although you can. It means that my primary way of gathering information is to see it. I do best by reading, watching – my eyes are sponges.

I had a class long, long ago where we learned the three primary ways people learn and communicate – visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. Do you know someone who argues a lot for no apparent reason? They are probably auditory, and need to keep data coming into through their ears in order to get the information they need. Or perhaps they’re just being difficult. Who am I to judge?

Anyway, for someone like me who gets the majority of his information through his eyeballs, it would stand to reason that it should be a rather easy formula for me to follow – if I don’t see it, it’s probably not there. Right?

So why do I spend so much time worrying about bad things that could happen? It’s almost like I can diagram it out on a flowchart. I can take a bad scenario, think about all of the ways it could happen, and then spend my time figuring out how I can avoid each of those problems. Ahhh!

When I’m doing this plotting and planning, I’m thinking, not feeling.

Leahy writes:

When you are engaged in the endless “what ifs” of worry, you are dredging up predictions and thoughts about how bad things can happen and then you come up with other thoughts about how to solve problems that don’t exist. You are temporarily suppressing your emotions. When you run out of worries-by exhausting yourself or by finally deciding, “I’ve covered all I can for now”— you find that your emotional arousal bounces back as free-floating anxiety. This is the tension that you feel in your body, the sweating, the rapid heart-beat, and the insomnia. Your emotions incubate as you worry and these emotions bounce back later. And then you will worry about your emotions: “What’s wrong with me?” or “Am I sick?”

One of the reminder tools that I used when I first started struggling with this concept was a polished little stone with the word “feel” engraved on it. I kept it in my pocket, and when I pulled out some change to buy a soda, or reached in for my keys, I had a gentle reminder that it was ok to let myself feel.

It was part of a broader exercise that involved embracing feeling instead of pushing it away, letting it wash over me and through me, sometimes speaking the name of the feeling out loud to make it real and present. When I was able to do that, it soon became apparent that feelings, like most things, are impermanent. They come, and they go. Rather than taking the long way ’round the barn to avoid them, it was actually faster and easier to just let them pass through.

Sure, reality can be a pretty frightening thing, and feeling the emotions that often accompany events can be draining and unpleasant. But other than a couple of times in my life – when my daughter died, or when my parents passed away – the awful situations I worked up in my head were never more painful or hard to deal with than the actual events that I eventually needed to face. And no amount of advance planning prepares you for the horrific agony of losing your child.

So you feel.

It doesn’t make any sense at the time, and it’s terrible. But then you realize that feeling badly is exactly what you are supposed to do. Bad things sometimes happen.

Learn to let yourself feel things. If you keep avoiding emotion, you’ll miss feeling all the good things, too. And there are a long more good things than bad.

How to use your emotions rather than worry about them