Am I Cold, or Sad?

Henry Wordsworth Longfellow was once quoted as saying, “Every man has his secret sorrows which the world knows not; and often times we call a man cold when he is only sad.”

I’ve been thinking about that quote lately, as the world has grown topsy-turvy and I find myself in an unsafe place. One of my defense mechanisms is to withdraw, like one of those potato bugs that curls into a ball at the first sign of danger, its hard outer shell offering a modicum of protection from the harsh reality of nature.

But the potato bug is small, and the world is very big. A threat of any consequence would easily overcome the tiny armored exterior. If nothing else, the insect could be completely crushed, smashed flat by an attacker.

That reality doesn’t stop the potato bug from curling up when danger lurks. Maybe it’s just one way for the bug to make it from day to day, confident that the instinctive reaction repels the enemy every time, until of course it doesn’t, but then the potato bug would be dead, you see, and the whole point would become moot, at least to the potato bug.

Getting back to me for a moment – when I’m feeling unsafe, or unsure, and I retreat, do people think I’m cold? Unapproachable? Distant? Aloof?

Maybe. Probably not those who know me well, and that’s admittedly a rather small group. Potato bugs don’t show their vulnerable underbelly unless they have to. But do I care about everyone else? And if the answer is “no”, does that make me less human? I don’t think it does. But if I had all the answers, I wouldn’t be sitting here in the shadows, typing black letters on a white screen.

Maybe it’s the difference between being detached and dejected, or separated and sorrowful. I’ve never been a “misery loves company” kind of guy, so it stands to reason that dysphoria could often be mistaken for distance. I take a pill for that. Maybe it’s time for a new pill?

I don’t know. I should probably ask about that the next time I see my doctor.

I’m not cold.

Can Yoga Help Workplace Stress & Anxiety?

With the often relentless pace at work, it’s sometimes difficult to carve out even a half-hour for lunch. Stepping away for 20-30 minutes to have a bite to eat, stretch my legs, and just get away from the workplace energy for a little while can be helpful in reducing those feelings of stress and anxiety that slowly surround me like a misty fog.

So when I read about this study that included guided workplace yoga and meditation to help with stress relief, my first thought was, “Where do I sign up?”, although I’m unsure that anyone wants to see me in full downward facing dog while wearing my Dockers.

I’ve written before about the benefits of mindfulness-based stress reduction therapy, most notably here and here. Conceptually, being able to recognize and be aware of your stressful, anxious state is the first step toward doing something about it. Over time, I learned breathing and relaxation techniques that can be put into use in just about any situation, at any time, the result being a more relaxed, unstressed version of me.

The study, conducted at the Ohio State University here in Columbus, was specifically designed for office worker types wearing business apparel, and involved an hour meeting once a week during lunch, plus 20 minutes per day of yoga and meditation performed at the subject’s desks. The results were impressive:

Mindful attention awareness increased significantly and perceived stress decreased significantly among the intervention group when compared to the control group’s responses. Overall sleep quality increased in both groups, but three of seven components of sleep were more affected in the intervention group.

On average, mindfulness increased by about 9.7 percent and perceived stress decreased by about 11 percent among the group that experienced the intervention. These participants also reported that it took them less time to fall asleep, they had fewer sleep disturbances and they experienced less daytime dysfunction than did members of the non-intervention group.

Two things jump out at me from this study – one, that simply being exposed to the concept of mindfulness, becoming aware of what you are feeling and why, is enormously beneficial. Secondly, there is an amazing sense of empowerment that comes from having effective tools, like yoga and meditation, to help address the stress and anxiety, and feeling better even a little bit can help spur you on, which can lead to even more effective results.

If you would like to know more about the study, you can read the full details at Anxiety Insights. Go forth and unwind those tight muscles and loosen that tense mind!

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

Mindful Parenting

Over at his Psychology Today blog, Jonathan Kaplan has quite the essay on how the Buddhist concept of mindfulness can help you be a better parent.

Anyone who has been around small children can tell you that achieving the perfect alignment between what the adult thinks should be happening and what the child wants to happen is nearly impossible. That doesn’t stop a lot of parents from trying to force this convergence via sheer force of will, or failing that, misdirection and/or manipulation. More often than not, frustration sets in for the parent, the child, or both.

In Jonathan’s case, he attempts to get his two year old son to help decide on what he would like on his daycare blanket, but is repeatedly thwarted by his son’s focus on trains, apple juice, and jumping on the bed. Who can blame him? Jumping on the bed is awesome!

Jonathan shares one of his lessons learned:

Fortunately, I learned a few things from this experience. First, parenting can be a quite a fruitful area for informal mindfulness practice. At a conference recently, Jon and Myla Kabat-Zinn described parenting as an “18 year retreat.” They noted how kids “push our buttons”, which can prompt us to react negatively. As Myla stated, “Sometimes, we don’t live love. We live fear and anxiety and the thoughts that take over us.” In this instance, I started to feel anxious about my son’s unhelpful replies and became lost in my own reactions. By seeing this circumstance as problematic and trying to fix it, I unfortunately missed out on some fun play time.

That’s a lightning bolt observation for me – “Sometimes, we don’t live love. We live fear and anxiety and the thoughts that take over us.” Being present, being mindful, especially when it comes to family, was a huge struggle for me, as I detailed in my postings The Struggle To Be Present and Teaching A Kid To Listen .

As I worked through becoming more mindful and present, it was readily apparent that my parenting style was undergoing a tweaking. Rather than becoming frustrated in dealing with my young son, I began to look at things from his perspective more, and the key question I started to ask myself during these sorts of situations was if what I was wanting him to do was important, or if it was only important to me.

More often than not, the latter was true, and that’s just plain silly. As noted in Jonathan’s essay, I was missing out on wide swaths of my child’s experiences because of my narrow focus on achieving the goal at hand. Kids take a very circuitous route through life, much like a butterfly fluttering around a meadow, and that’s part of the beauty of youth. I should encourage that, not restrict it, either knowingly or unconsciously.

Extrapolating that even further, if I was caught in this pattern with parenting, undoubtedly it was applicable in other aspects of my life. So, by practicing mindfulness in all aspects of my day-to-day interactions, I would be appropriately focused. Parenting turned into a daily reminder and exercise.

It’s also a good prompt to see and interact with our kids as they are, not how we want them to be, or how we see them to be. It’s easy to fall into the trap of viewing everything through a parental filter, and then all events and decisions downstream are based on clouded, unrealistic information.

Letting Go of Expectations: A Lesson in Mindful Parenting

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.

CNN Discovers Mindfulness

You know that eastern practices are becoming more mainstream when CNN starts reporting on them. Heck, I would expect Glenn Beck to begin railing against yoga and meditation now, as both exercises clearly discriminate against the mindless hordes.

All political humor aside, the mere fact that the concept of mindfulness is catching on in these odd and confusing times shows that perhaps the philosophy of quick fixes and pharmaceutical intervention is becoming antiquated as the populace discovers that much like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz, they had the power all along.

I’ve written about mindfulness here, here, and here, and the longer I practice, the more beneficial it becomes. Certainly, attaining a mindful state isn’t something that happens quickly, or easily. Thoughts and feelings intrude incessantly at the beginning, and it can be difficult to push the head full of busy out of the way and refocus.

But the mere act of recognizing a lack of focus and the presence of intruding chatter and chaos is itself therapeutic, as it helps to frame the amount of noise with which we’re normally dealing and provides a sense of empowerment and calm when we begin to have success at reducing the bedlam to white noise.

The CNN article discusses various “mindfulness” techniques as solutions for stress-busting, but that’s become a sort of catch-all, a default description for anything that helps someone to slow down and feel better. Breathing exercises, stretching, yoga – all are part of plucking yourself out of the rat race and pushing the reboot button to reset your level of tension and anxiety.

Think of your muscles, mind, and body as a rubber band. Visualize that rubber band being stretched when you’re stressed and tense, and then watch it as it grows slack, returning to its natural state. Over time, this rubber band continues to stretch, growing tense, but often fails to fully return to its original loose form due to the underlying tension that never quite goes completely away.

Therefore, our rubber bands end up being partially stretched at all times, so when we do relax, we don’t do it in the manner that we did before – we only return part of the way to a non-stretched condition.

Practicing mindfulness and stress-reduction helps us take that rubber band and relax it the rest of the way, so that it’s both easier to notice the disparity between the stressed and non-stressed self, but also to fully grow limp from an emotional, physical, and spiritual perspective.

I’ve actually seen great benefit to proactive mindfulness – doing a bit of deep breathing and mind-clearing prior to entering meetings or situations that are typically stressful, so that I’m much more relaxed at the beginning and my stress thermometer is starting from a much lower reading.

Mindfulness – catch it!

Mindfulness training busts stress , via CNN

Depression Helped by Ancient-Modern Combo

Jonathan Wood, writing in Anxiety Insights, details ongoing research at Oxford University that demonstrates the effectiveness of a treatment regimen that includes ancient meditation techniques combined with modern cognitive behavior therapy.

Everything old is new again!

MBCT, or Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, was used in a small sample study involving severely depressed patients, some of whom had expressed thoughts of suicide. The therapy included learning about meditation (always helpful), education about depression, and training on what patients could do to help themselves when they start to feel overwhelmed.

The treatment reduced the number of patients with major depression, compared to no change in the control group. Promising stuff!

As we’ve discussed at KnowFear many times, the Buddhist concepts of mindfulness and self-awareness can be powerful tools in the treatment of a number of disorders. Taking the time to examine and understand what’s happening is beneficial in a number of ways, including being an active participant in your treatment rather than acting as a passive patient, waiting to be cured.

Be here now. Be somewhere else later. Is that so hard?

Ancient-modern therapy combo provides hope for severely depressed

Riding the “E” Train – Mindfulness of Emotions

Jonathan Kaplan, Ph.D., writing in his Psychology Today blog, digs a little deeper into the concept of being aware of your emotional state.

Equating it to a subway train approaching and then zooming past, Kaplan discusses how emotion rises to a peak, like the train coming on fast, and then subsides. He then provides a detailed exercise to use as a tool to recognizing emotional peaks and valleys.

It’s really part of the holistic approach to emotion that we discuss here from time to time, along with the linkage we attempt to establish between emotional and physical response.

Riding the “E” Train: Mindfulness of Emotions

The Struggle To Be Present

Of all the symptoms of anxiety that I exhibit, the one that I find particularly challenging is withdrawal.

It can be insidious, creeping up slowly, bit by bit, to the point that I don’t even realize that I’m shrinking into my protective shell. Often there is no warning, a complete lack of indication that anything is amiss. And then…I’m gone.

The duration of my stay can vary, based on factors both internal and external. If it’s a particularly stressful time, there’s a good chance I’ll have more difficulty extricating myself from the clutches of withdrawal. It sometimes takes prompting from family, first for me to recognize that I’ve been gone, and then to put myself on the track to coming back from whence I traveled.

My lovely wife came back from a trip to India with a copy of The Buddha at War, my introduction to the concepts and philosophy of the Buddha self. I found it remarkably helpful because it addressed many of the inexplicable confusions that I faced. From the perspective of never-ending change and the theory of impermanence to the idea of how the illusion of control had driven some of the behaviors I was seeking to change, Buddhist examples provided a beginners roadmap for my trek to getting better, whatever that meant.

But the most powerful message I took from my first reading of the book was how important it was for me to be present. In order to be fully aware and engaged, I had to be here now. That’s not as simple as it sounds, even for someone who might not share my struggle. Physical presence is rather easy to evidence – you’re either here or you’re not. It’s sort of hard to argue that point with a loved one. Am not. Am too! Feh.

Emotional and spiritual presence is a whole different animal. We’ve all been through seminars and training sessions at work or school that dealt with developing listening skills. “What I hear you saying is….”

That’s not being present. Full engagement – actively choosing to participate completely, unequivocally, to the exclusion of intruding thoughts or emotions – aye, that’s the challenge. And it’s not easy at all.

Once you’ve been present, it’s hard to cheat and pretend that you’re there when you’re not. People know. They’ve seen the difference in you, the quality, the…well….presence. It’s like pornography. It can be a little difficult to define, but you know it when you see it. Perhaps you’ve experienced that level of engagement with someone before. If so, you’ll know what I mean.

And it’s draining, especially for an introvert with anxiety issues. Two strikes there. But the rewards, to me and to others, are so rich, so profound, that when I do it, it’s time well spent. I’m tired, but it’s a productive kind of tired, a weariness born of achievement.

Being present – practicing mindfulness – is a very healthy way to overcome the anxiety that is always around the corner, waiting for the opportunity to pounce. When you have a quiet mind, it’s impossible to feel panic and stress. And how do you develop a quiet mind? The same way you get to Broadway – practice, practice, practice.

I’ll write more about mindfulness and being present in the months ahead, because it’s such an important part of my journey. Being present is a very good thing, and I wish it on everyone, anxious or not.

If you’d like an interesting view, I’d recommend Pema Chodron’s essay, Learning to Stay.