Anxiety Happens, page 11
I can do nothing about the anxious feelings and thoughts, rather than distracting myself, taking pills, and running away from them.
I can practice patience with myself, rather than blaming and putting myself or others down for having anxieties.
I can move forward in my life with anxieties, rather than struggling with them and remaining stuck.
It’s your choice whether you stay with your anxieties, acknowledge their presence, let them be, and observe them with a sense of curiosity and kind acceptance, or do as they say, pick up the rope in the tug-of-war, and give in to the impulses to act by choosing avoidance, escape, suppression, or other ways to try to control or get rid of them. It really is your choice.
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Inhabiting Your Body
Just as you can touch the armrest of a chair, feeling its texture, so too can you make contact with your emotional life. The practice is to get to know yourself and what it’s really like to feel what you feel when anxiety and fear show up.
So the practice is to touch your experience, make room for it, and learn something new. But remember, this isn’t about wading in the muck and discomfort for its own sake. This is not about white-knuckling it either. The practice is to open up to what your body and mind offer. No more resisting or struggling. In this way, you transform your relationship with yourself and create the space you need to move in directions you truly care about.
As you practice the next exercise, remember why you’re doing it. This is about living your life with anxiety or without anxiety. No more fighting. No more resisting. You open up, with compassion and curiosity, to your emotional experiences. This opening up is probably the kindest thing you can do for yourself.
Emotional Contact
Start by getting yourself comfortable in a place where you’ll be undisturbed for five to ten minutes. Follow the instructions as best you can and use your imagination to bring them to life in your mind and heart.
What is hardest for you about feeling anxiety or fear? Pause for a moment and think about what you feel in your body, focusing on your physical sensations. What physical sensations do you typically experience (for example, tension, racing heart, dizziness, nausea)?
How do these physical sensations tend to get in the way of what you want to do? Here, focus on something important to you—one of your important values.
Now stop. Pick one of the physical sensations that you would be willing to explore.
For that one physical sensation, decide if you’re willing to explore it as it is. Remember, willingness is a choice—you choose it or not. Unless you’re willing, there is no point in moving on. So decide if your life and your values are important enough that you’d be willing to see what it’s really like to feel what you feel.
Now ask yourself, “Did I feel this one physical sensation before it was part of my anxiety?” Look deeply into your past, because you probably did feel it. As you look back, ask yourself, “Must this one physical sensation really be my enemy?” And even if you don’t like it, are you willing to have it just as it is—one physical sensation in your body?
Now close your eyes and focus on that important value of yours. See yourself doing what you care about as that one physical sensation shows up.
Notice the sensation in your body with some curiosity. Where do you feel it? What is it really like? Now breathe spaciousness and kindness into and out of that physical sensation. Imagine touching it with the breath of healing and kindness. Continue until you sense some spaciousness.
Now again consider that one physical sensation. Is it really your enemy? Or can you hold it gently when it shows up, and go ahead and do what you care about? You can, even if your mind tells you no!
Before finishing, pause and think about what you learned about yourself. You are learning to inhabit your emotional body in a new way.
This exercise may have been hard to do, but it will get easier with practice. In that spirit, allow yourself time to repeat this exercise several times, sticking with only one physical sensation. Do that until you truly begin to sense some space to hold that sensation without resistance or struggle. Then you can move on to another sensation that you’re willing to explore. As you do, be mindful that you’re changing your relationship with your emotional body. No longer fighting, you’re in a place where you can move with it and do what you care about in your daily life. You are now the one in charge!
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Growing Through Adversity
Anxiety and your other emotional pain and hurt are not your enemies. They are your teachers. Think about that for a moment. Without experiencing disappointment, you’d never learn to hold your expectations about the future more lightly. Without the hurt and frustration, you’d never learn kindness and compassion or perseverance. Without exposure to new information, you’d never learn anything new. Without fear, you’d never learn courage. Even getting sick once serves a purpose—it strengthens your immune system and helps you to appreciate good health.
Moments of adversity and pain provide you with opportunities for growth and change. They teach you important skills. They give you new perspectives on life. You need them. They offer you great opportunities to expand beyond your comfort zone and thrive.
When you face difficulty, focus on what you can control to have your needs met and to keep you moving forward in directions that you care about. When you have painful experiences, apply your compassionate observer skills to them. Choose to open up to and embrace them in the service of doing something you care about. This is something you can do.
But you’ll need a specific plan that keeps you moving forward even in the face of adversity. You’ll need to be able to catch the old unhelpful programming so you can create the conditions for genuine happiness to grow within you. The next exercise will help you on this path.
Going Backward or Forward?
Whenever you encounter barriers and you’re unsure whether your planned action is good for you, ask yourself one simple question: “Is my response to this event, thought, feeling, worry, or bodily sensation moving me closer to or further away from where I want to go with my life?” The following are some variations of this crucial question:
If that thought (emotion, bodily state, memory) could give advice, would the advice point me forward in my life or keep me stuck?
What advice would my value [bring to mind a core value of yours] give me right now?
What would I advise my child or someone else to do in this situation?
If others could see what I’m doing now, would they see me doing things that I value?
In what valued direction have my feet taken me when I listened to this advice?
What does my experience tell me about this solution? And what do I trust more—my mind and feelings, or my experience?
When you face adversity and doubt, it is far more helpful to ask questions like these than to listen to what your unwise anxious mind comes up with or what the surging impulses seem to be telling you. The answers will remind you that past solutions have not worked. Now you can choose to do something new.
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One Step at a Time
Your life is made up of the steps you take—what you do. Each and every step will move you either toward or away from what matters to you. The key is to step wisely, for with these steps you create your life and the conditions for genuine happiness.
Wise steps are those guided by your values—your North Stars that we talked about earlier. Values, as you learned, act like a beacon. They point you toward what’s important to you. This is crucial when you feel pulled and pushed around in a sea of worry, anxiety, panic, and doom and gloom.
The wonderful thing about values is that they can give a very personal meaning to your life. The key to living out your values is, again, to break them down into incremental steps. Living a rich life is all about taking steps, however small or large, toward achieving your goals and living your values, each and every day.
You must commit to taking those steps. You do that by setting SMART goals and following through with action.
Let’s go over the elements of SMART goals, one by one:
Specific—Identify concrete goals on your path.
Meaningful—Set goals that matter to you and reflect your values.
Active—Select goals that you can accomplish yourself and that add to your life satisfaction and vitality in some way.
Realistic—Set goals that are reasonable, given your life circumstances.
Time-framed—Be able to make a commitment to the day and time when you plan to take the step, and the setting. (And after you complete a step, don’t forget to pat yourself on the back!)
SMART goals are like destinations that you’ll visit in your journey toward living out your values—stepping-stones along your valued path. Now it’s your turn.
The next exercise will teach you how to set SMART goals that embody your values and move you in directions that truly matter to you.
Creating SMART Goals
Select a value that you wish to manifest more fully and wholeheartedly in your life. Write it down in a word or two and keep it in mind as you develop SMART goals that bring that value to life in your life.
Once you have this value clearly in mind, close your eyes, and ask yourself, “What would others see me doing that would be an outward expression of this value?” Think as small or as large as you wish, but be specific. Keep the image of what you saw yourself doing clear in your mind. If you like, you can also jot it down. You now have a Specific goal.
Next, listening to your heart and what you really care about and want to be about as a person, ask yourself, “Does this really matter to me? And does this action express my heart?” If you answer yes, then you have a Meaningful goal.
Look again at your specific goal. Be sure it’s something you can control and do with your mouth, hands, and feet. And be sure it’s something that could leave you with a sense of satisfaction and vitality, even if doing what you’re setting out to do may at times be challenging. An active goal ought to be something that gets your mouth, hands, and feet moving and has the potential to leave you with a sense that you just did something good for yourself and your life. If you think that’s true of the action you selected, then you have an Active goal.
Is the goal Realistic and does it have a doable Time-frame? Here it’s important to look honestly at your life and circumstances. Ask yourself whether you may need to coordinate your plans with others. And don’t set a goal that is fanciful or beyond what you can do. Walking three times a week for twenty minutes may be a realistic SMART goal in the service of values related to health, or even values linked to being out in nature. But suddenly deciding to run a marathon tomorrow may be unrealistic.
The last important piece here involves action in your life. Once you set a SMART goal, take the step to live out your values in situations that have been difficult for you. Make a commitment and follow through. Use all the tools in this book to help you move with your anxious mind and body. Then give yourself time to reflect on what you’ve learned and what it felt like to do something good for yourself and your life.
Don’t be discouraged if now and then you fail to take the step. When that happens, come back to what’s important, recommit to your SMART goal (or even adjust it as needed), use the skills in this book, and then commit to taking another step once more. Even baby steps will take you up the tallest of mountains.
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The Journey Ahead
You’ve probably heard the saying “Life’s a journey, not a destination.” However trite it may be, it contains a great truth. No matter how you look at it, your journey—everything you spend your time doing or not doing—is what you’ll look back on someday and call your life.
You deserve to be genuinely happy. And your journey isn’t over yet. Along the way, you’ll face new obstacles, doubts, and setbacks. The old anxiety barriers will show up too. At times, you won’t put your commitments into action. Sometimes you’ll slip into old anxiety habits. Once in a while, you may take longer to reach a goal than you had hoped. All of this and more is just fine. We each move at our own pace.
You can draw upon the strategies and skills you’ve learned in this book when difficulty threatens to get in the way of vitality. This is how you keep yourself moving forward and LIVE!
Sitting still with your anxieties, doubts, and fears and not getting all tangled up with them is one of the toughest parts when practicing courage on a day-to-day basis, and so is the first step of LIVE: letting go of the internal dialogue and struggle. Over time, you’ll get more skilled—so long as you keep practicing kindness toward your own slipups, limitations, and all-too-human inability to be perfect.
Begin each day with this commitment. Perhaps it’s something like “Today, to the best of my ability, I’m going to act with kindness and courage.” Then follow that with an intention to make your day a value-rich day. In the evening, go back and examine your day with loving-kindness. Don’t beat yourself up if your day ends up being filled with some of the same old things you’ve always done. Look for the new and vital things you did do that day.
Compassion, softness, flexibility, and courage are skills and powerful antidotes to suffering. Recognize that you’re only human and that you’re going to make mistakes and experience setbacks. You’re never going to be able to be courageous and accepting all the time; still, you keep moving in directions you care about, one day at a time.
What matters is that you are taking steps to bring acceptance and compassion to yourself and your worries, anxieties, and fears. The small steps eventually add up. Sooner or later you’ll find that kindness and patience have become habits in your life. Give yourself time. Working through this book in the span of several weeks is not the end of something. It’s the beginning of a new chapter in your life. And the work isn’t over with this book. Your life journey takes a lifetime.
Keep practicing the skills you’ve learned in this book. Focus on exercises and metaphors that have been especially helpful in getting you unstuck and moving forward. Revisit them and focus on them.
Finally, many of the exercises in this book include forms of meditation. There is a good reason for this. Based on our own experience and countless research studies, we know that meditation is one of the most powerful ways to bring greater happiness and fulfillment to your life. The Dalai Lama once said that if every child going to school today would learn meditation and practice it, there would be peace in the world twenty years from now. Even if you’re much older than a five-year-old, it’s never too late to make changes and create peace, at least in your own life. So choose a meditation that works for you and stick with it. You won’t regret it.
It’s risky to make changes. Things sometimes do go wrong or don’t turn out as intended. Yet the biggest risk in life is taking no risk at all. Few things in life are certain. The future is, by definition, unknowable. Most choices involve risk for this very reason. Choosing to play it supersafe guarantees that nothing will change. And if nothing changes, you’ll end up going where you’ve always headed before—a place where you’re stuck, suffering, and waiting for your life to begin. Risking living your life, while you can, is risky business, but the payoff is huge—you’ll get more of what you want. When you risk living out your dreams, those dreams just might come true.
Before we wrap up, let’s take a moment to reflect on a question that you can apply again and again throughout your life. This is not an exercise that you just do a few times and then move on. Instead, it is a very practical and fundamental practice that we encourage you to keep on doing for the rest of your life––an approach to LIVE your life.
LIVE the Life Question
What we call the “life question” is by far the single most important question life is asking you when you’re faced with barriers, problems, and pain.
At those times, stop, take a deep breath or two, and ask yourself this simple life question:
Am I willing to take all that life offers and still do what matters to me?
We all need to face this question squarely and be willing to answer it, moment by moment, for as long as we’re alive.
And it turns out that yes is the only answer that will help you create a life in line with your values. To answer no means only one thing: you’re choosing not to live the life you want. Even if you find yourself answering no to the life you want right now, remember, you can always choose to change your answer, to take a bold step on a new path, and to risk doing something new to get a different outcome in your life.
The most rewarding thing you can do to create a life that matters is to put each moment of every day to good use. How you decide to use your precious time and energy from this day forward is up to you. Anxiety happens to everyone. But you don’t have to let it take over and control your life. You can focus on making your life happen. The skills you’ve been learning in this book are your friends to help you stay on track, anxiety or not.
Use your time wisely. There’s no going back, no way to carry over to tomorrow the lost moments of today. In the end, it all adds up to what you’ll call your life. Make the most of it. Make it about something bigger than your anxiety. We know you can do it. You have the skills. Continue to nurture them. Allow them to grow. Make your values a reality. This is what matters and what, in the end, leads people to say, “Now there was a life well lived.”
John P. Forsyth, PhD, is professor of psychology and director of the anxiety disorders research program at the University at Albany, SUNY. Forsyth is a highly sought-after speaker, acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) workshop leader, and member of the teaching faculty at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, the Esalen Institute, and 1440 Multiversity. His teachings and writing focus on how to use ACT and mindfulness practices to alleviate suffering, awaken the human spirit, and cultivate well-being. He is coauthor of The Mindfulness and Acceptance Workbook for Anxiety.
