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.

Internet Psychotherapy Proving Effective

You know, there might just be one good thing that comes out of Internet webcams after all!

Anxiety Insights links to an Australian study that demonstrates online therapy can be just as effective as face-to-face sessions. What’s interesting is that patients only required an average of 111 minutes of clinician contact over an eight-week period, which is far less than most patients spend in office therapy sessions over the same timeframe.

The online program centers around treatment for depression, and 34% of patients felt they were no longer depressed after the two-month program, while 82% reported being either very or mostly satisfied with the treatment regimen at completion.

This bodes well for those who avoid seeking treatment due to social stigma, transportation, and provider availability issues, and since most of the program involves email contact and homework lessons, high-speed Internet connectivity isn’t a requirement – sorry to disappoint you webcam fiends.

Technology is opening new treatment vectors all the time, and the online experience can help with one of the sticky aspects of conditions like depression, which is the tendency to withdraw and avoid contact. Online therapy is a good middle step between no treatment and office visits.

On-line psychotherapy as effective as face-to-face therapy, via Anxiety Insights

Genetic Anxiety Doesn’t Always Lead to a Fearful Life

In the Nature vs. Nurture debate, it’s often posited that our destiny isn’t an either-or proposition, but rather a complex combination of the two. Why should anxiety be any different?

While it’s true that people with certain genotypes are at greater risk for drug & alcohol abuse, anxiety, and depression, that does not necessarily mean they are predestined to a life of misery, fear, or negative outcome. That’s where the nurture part seems to play a key role.

Having a single nurturing influence, while valuable, seems rather ineffective compared with having a robust nurturing environment during a child’s development when it comes to these genetic issues. So, those who may have one of those nasty genes in their DNA may be protected from the bad effects normally associated with them if raised in a richly supportive climate.

The next step would logically include identification of the qualifying genotypes to assist in targeting at-risk children to ensure they have a backdrop of adequate care during development, much like you could focus on nutrition and screening if your genome indicated predilection toward diabetes or allergies.

Genetic anxiety susceptibility does not have to be destiny

Anxiety Crisis Care Plan

Being in the information risk business,  one of the things we’re taught to do early on is to develop a crisis response plan and implement it before there’s an actual….crisis. I know! Preparation – what a concept.

The thinking is that in designing your crisis plan in advance, you can test and tweak it to hopefully find gaps and weaknesses before you actually need it. Not only that, but having a plan on which to refer when a crisis hits can make things go more smoothly, as everyone knows their responsibilities, and you don’t have to remember this stuff or design it on the fly as you run around with your hair on fire, metaphorically speaking.

The same concept is true when it comes to having a panic/anxiety crisis plan. What are you going to do when you feel that familiar sense of dread creeping up? How about when you find  yourself in full panic mode, where nothing makes sense and simply functioning is a challenge? Can you help yourself, or do you need help from others?

Anxiety Guru has a good article on developing a solid crisis care plan, including some of the resources you can call on in your moment of need. We’re sometimes a stubborn lot, convinced that we can fix it ourselves or just wait it out, but if we’re going to be honest here, that’s not always effective. It’s certainly not a plan.

The good news is that it’s somewhat therapeutic to design your crisis plan, especially if it entails bringing in friends, family members, and other supporters on whom you’d like to rely. The more they understand about what’s “normal” for you and what sorts of behaviors would cause you to kick off your crisis plan, the better job they can do of giving you the support you need.

So make a plan. Write it down to make it real, and refer to it from time to time. And let me know how it goes. If you come up with an outline of a plan that you think would be helpful to others, let me know and I’ll post it here for others to see. We’re all facing the same hurdles, so let’s share the wisdom!

Crisis Care Plan for Anxiety and Depression