Anxiety Happens, page 4
The voice of anxiety will offer an endless stream of thoughts covering all of your deep-seated fears and worries, and all that’s wrong with you. On top of that, it tells you that you need to do something about it, or else! So it offers another stream of thoughts in the form of sensible-sounding solutions. “Breathe slowly. Take a pill. Watch TV. Go to bed early. Take it easy, call in sick.” And so on. This voice comes from the well-established and familiar belief that anxiety and fear are somehow dangerous, that it’s impossible to feel anxiety and still live a good life, that managing and controlling anxiety is the way out of misery and into happiness.
The voice is fooling you. It tells you that you need to control anxiety to be happy. Yet all that effort tends to make matters worse. To break free from this cycle, you’ll need to learn to identify the voices of anxiety and all the unhelpful solutions they offer. The next exercise will help you learn to do just that.
Discover Unhelpful Thoughts
Get yourself centered, and then reflect on the following questions. Listen for the voice of anxiety and what it commands you to do. Be specific and list each thought and each apparent solution. Write them down if you’d like.
What does the voice of anxiety tell me that I need to do to about it when I’m right in the middle of feeling anxious or afraid?
What does the voice of anxiety tell me I should not do so that I can prevent anxiety and fear from happening again?
Now think about each apparent solution, and reflect on these questions:
Have any of them worked in the long term?
Do any of these voices capture the essence of what you want to be about as a person?
When you listen and do as the voices command, do you end up doing more or less with your life?
It takes practice to learn to catch the voices of anxiety and call them out for what they truly are. So, do that. Practice observing what anxiety commands you to do. Identify the voices of anxiety that limit you. When you learn to observe and label the voices as more thinking, you will create space to make wise, life-affirming choices. You don’t have to blindly follow everything your anxious mind offers you.
This is also a great opportunity to again practice doing the opposite—the skill you learned in Chapter 10. Instead of listening to unhelpful voices in your head, you can choose to do the opposite of what they tell you to do. You may find that you end up doing more of what you really want to do rather than what your anxious mind commands you to do.
13
On Autopilot
“Mindless activity” is a popular catchphrase. It describes a common human experience that we know, and you know, all too well. Time and again, we’ve found ourselves going about our days, doing various tasks, with little or no awareness of what is going on around us.
If you’ve ever read the newspaper or a book and found your eyes at the bottom of the page without any idea how you got there, then you know what we mean.
The mind is a master conductor, orchestrating our bodies and experience. So much so, in fact, that we can literally lose contact with the world around us just as it is. We may then find ourselves living in our heads, in the world of thoughts, ideas, and images. This can leave us feeling disconnected from the world. Perhaps even disembodied. But you shouldn’t fault yourself for that. The mind has a very difficult time staying wholly present with what’s going on.
To get back in touch with your life and experience, you’ll need to reprogram your mind. It needs to be taught to come back to the present and to what’s going on as it is. There are many ways to retrain the mind, but here we’d like to suggest an activity you probably do all the time and mostly without conscious awareness of doing it: walking.
Mindful Walking
Walking is a wonderful way to learn to be a skillful observer of your thoughts and feelings. The practice asks you to take conscious control over your experience. No longer at the mercy of the mind’s endless edicts and wanderings, you learn that you—not your mind—are in charge of what you want to do and where you want to go.
Take yourself for a fifteen-minute walk. Focus on your breathing—deeply in and out—and walk naturally. Bring your awareness to the rhythm of your steps and how your body feels as it moves. If your mind wanders to other things, just notice that. Then gently bring your attention back to the experience of walking.
Notice the feel of your feet as they meet the ground with each step. Move your awareness to your hip area, your midsection, your arms and legs—experience how they move with each stride. See how your body is in perfect rhythm and flow.
Notice how you’re moving with your thoughts and feelings too—all of them going forward. Sense the vitality in this movement. You control the steps you take and the directions you go.
Once you finish, take a few moments to reflect on your experience. What showed up for you as you walked? What was it like to walk with your mind? What was walking like as you became more consciously aware of the experience of walking?
As with any skill, learning to be a mindful observer takes practice. The good news is that life offers abundant opportunities to practice, and not just when you’re walking. You can also practice being a mindful observer when mowing the lawn, taking a shower, brushing your teeth, driving in your car, doing the dishes, or having a conversation. As you bring mindful awareness into your life, you learn that you have the power to take your mind and emotional weather with you wherever you wish to go.
14
Whole, Complete, Enough
People struggling with anxiety are some of the strongest people we know. They’re survivors. You probably are too!
But many are also very harsh with themselves. They believe that they’re not good enough; that they’re too weak; that they’re not trying hard enough. Do you find yourself thinking this way too? You might think, “I’m somehow broken.” Or worse, “I’m not good enough.” It’s in this place of lack, or “not enough,” that struggle and shame find the spark that they need to grow.
This is the human mind at work, creating thoughts. Sometimes, thoughts will be harsh and judgmental. In fact, the mind can judge just about anything in the world around you and the world within you—beautiful, wonderful, likable, terrible, awful, and so on. It can even turn judgment on you—on the very essence of your being.
If you allow it, this darker side of the mind can invade more and more areas of your life, trapping you and keeping you stuck. But there’s a healthy escape route, a way out of the clutches of this toxic thinking. It starts with catching the self-loathing before it consumes you.
In truth, you have everything you need. There’s no such thing as a broken person. This is a judgment—a thought—that the mind creates and applies to your experience over and over again. And it’s a lifeless judgment at that.
You, and only you, can decide if you’ll listen. You don’t have to swallow everything your mind dishes out. This is an important and necessary first step to harness your capacity for self-kindness and compassion—one of the most powerful antidotes to suffering when your mind is unkind.
As you learn to do that, you’ll discover that your life can be different. Your life need not be determined by what you think. You don’t have to buy into unhelpful thoughts your mind feeds you. You can learn how to act on your anxiety differently!
Watch the Judgment
Allow yourself to get settled and centered in a quiet space. Set the intention to make this your kind and gentle space. Take a moment or two and consider what your mind tells you about you and your anxiety problem. How does your mind beat you up and beat you down? Look for the “I’m not enough” message. Inside that message is the idea that it’s not okay to be you. If you allow this to take over your life, you’ll naturally struggle to change what you think and what you feel, because your mind is telling you “It’s not okay; you’re not okay just as you are.” And before you know it, your mind has drawn you back into another round of tug-of-war!
Become aware of the labels your mind creates about you, your feelings, your self-worth as a person, and your life.
Pick one judgment or label and imagine projecting those words onto a giant movie screen in front of you.
See the words, the letters, the color of the ink, and the limitations and lifelessness in those thoughts. Notice that you can observe the judgment. Notice that the words are not you. You can simply look at them without blindly believing them.
As you look, don’t get into an argument with your mind about the truth of the thoughts. Truth is far less important compared with helpful. The only thing that really matters now is whether a particular thought is helping you move forward or keeping you stuck where you are.
Breathe gently into each projection, each judgment, with a sense of peace and kind allowing.
Allow the projections to come and go, and sink into an inner knowing that you are so much more than the projections that your mind manufactures about you.
See if you can bring this observing awareness into the experiences of each day whenever old, lifeless, and limiting thoughts pop into your awareness and try to keep you stuck. Connect with the inner voice inside you, calling out that you are whole, complete, and enough as you are!
15
Kindness and Self-Care
Many people can be very hard on themselves. You may be hard on yourself, too. You might ask yourself, “Why can’t I snap out of it? This is so stupid. I know it’s all in my head. I’m angry at myself, and I’m angry at the world. I hate my panic attacks—I just hate them.”
All this blaming and hating isn’t the solution. In fact, it creates the conditions for things to get worse. There’s no sugarcoating this point. When you meet negative emotional energy with more negative energy in the form of self-judgment and blame, you will suffer more.
What you need is a shift in perspective. This shift asks you to decide, perhaps for the first time, to change your relationship with your mind, body, and experience. Instead of blaming and hating, you can decide to take care of your own house—your mind, body, emotional life, and anything else that your old history throws at you.
There are only two ways to go here. You can create a house that is hostile and unkind or one full of friendliness and kindness. Acting with kindness toward yourself means acting in a caring and loving way. Here, you practice treating yourself—mind, body, and spirit—as you would treat someone or something you love and cherish. This is a choice only you can make.
Practicing acts of kindness toward yourself is a potent remedy for anxiety, anger, regret, shame, and depression. This practice will make it easier for you to stop fighting with your mind and body. It’s a simple thing you can do to bring more peace and joy to your life.
Practice Being Good to Yourself
Start each day by setting an intention, before you get out of bed in the morning, to practice at least one act of kindness toward yourself. Be unwavering in your commitment to follow through during the day.
Think about something you could do to be kind to yourself. Be specific and write it down. This could involve taking time to practice meditation, reading a good book, going for a walk, listening to music, gardening, or preparing a good meal. Or it might take the form of treating yourself in a kind and loving way when life is unkind, or when your mind and body offer you experiences that are unpleasant. Here, think how you might respond if someone else you care for was in your shoes, going through what you’re going through. How would you treat this person? Then apply that same tone of voice and kind heart to your experience.
Be mindful that you do this not because you have accomplished something special to deserve it. And this isn’t about being selfish. You do it because it matters to your health and well-being. Call it an act of self-care if that helps. You are worthy of kindness because you have a heart and are alive. We all are worthy of kindness, and not just on special occasions. Self-kindness and love are available to us all the time and any time.
So whenever you need kindness, you don’t have to wait until other people are kind to you. You can choose to respond to your needs any time by showing tender loving care toward yourself. When you do, you’re building the inner strength you need to create your best life!
16
Cultivating Allowing
We’ve met countless people who have struggled with anxiety. And, at some point, many of them have said “I know—I just need to accept my anxiety.” They think acceptance means giving up. Eventually, they stop making any effort to change. But this isn’t what acceptance asks of us.
Acceptance is really a choice to open up and be with whatever is happening anyway, just as it is. But you cannot accept what you do not know. And you cannot accept what you resist and are hostile toward.
So, to accept something means to make space for it and to allow it to be there. You also need to be willing to look at what makes you feel uneasy. This is where learning to be more mindful and present can make a huge difference.
Mindfulness exercises teach us that we cannot choose what comes into our minds and what we feel. We can choose only what we pay attention to, how we pay attention, and what we do. This will help you to see your difficult experiences more clearly and to show up more fully to the sweet moments in your life too.
But without kindness and compassion, there’s no healthy way to allow anxiety or any other unpleasant emotional experiences to be there. Instead, it will feel like you’re holding a ticking time bomb just waiting for it to explode and doing nothing about it. But you can hold your pain gently, and with some curiosity and compassion. This can transform and defuse the pain into something you can carry, honor, and perhaps even learn from and grow through. This is why we want you to remember to cultivate acceptance in your life.
The following exercise will help you do just that. It will teach you how to stay with your anxieties with loving-kindness toward yourself, bringing as much warmth and compassion into the situation as you can. This is a concrete way of learning that anxiety isn’t your enemy.
Allowing Thoughts and Feelings
Get into a comfortable seated position and allow your eyes to close gently.
Take a few moments to get in touch with the movement of your breath and the sensations in your body. As you do that, slowly bring your attention to the gentle rising and falling of your breath in your chest and belly.
Breathe naturally and, as best you can, bring an attitude of generous allowing and gentle acceptance to your experience, just as it is.
Sooner or later your mind will wander away from the breath to other concerns, thoughts, worries, images, bodily sensations, planning, or daydreams, or it may just drift along. When you notice your mind wandering, just acknowledge that and gently, and with kindness, come back to your breath.
If you become aware of feelings, tension, or other intense physical sensations, just notice them, acknowledge their presence, and see if you can make space for them. Imagine with each inhalation you are creating more space within you.
You may notice sensations in your body and how they change from moment to moment. Breathe calmly into and out from the sensations in any region of the body where you feel discomfort, imagining the breath moving into and out from those places.
Along with physical sensations in your body, you may also notice thoughts about the sensations—and thoughts about the thoughts. If that happens, just notice them and return to the breath and the present moment, as it is. Thoughts are thoughts, physical sensations are physical sensations, feelings are feelings, nothing more, nothing less.
Notice how thoughts and feelings come and go in your mind and body. Yet your breath is always with you in each moment. And that wise observer part of you is always with you too. This observer part of you can notice all the experiences you may have. You are the place and space for your experiences. You are not what your thoughts and feelings say, no matter how persistent or intense they may be. Make that space a kind space, a gentle space, a loving space, a welcome home.
Then, when you’re ready, gradually widen your attention to take in the sounds around you, and slowly open your eyes with the intention to bring mindful acceptance into the remaining moments of your day.
This exercise can be challenging to do at first. But don’t let that judgment stand in the way of repeating it over the weeks to come. Remember that acceptance is a skill that grows with practice. The goal is to develop the skill so that you can then apply it in your life, anytime and anyplace. There’s no right or wrong way to practice. So be kind with yourself as you do the practice. The important thing is that you commit to doing this exercise on the path to becoming a better observer and full participant in your life.
17
Popping the Illusion
There is something magical about watching a very young child at play. Children are often utterly present in the moment, unencumbered by an endless stream of thoughts. But as they grow, very quickly that sense of presence recedes as they develop ways to think and communicate about themselves and their world using language and other forms of symbolic communication.
As adults we often fail to see that words are powerful ways to share experiences, but they’re nothing like the real thing. Thinking about sitting in a comfy chair is nothing like the experience of actually sitting in a comfy chair.
But as we swim in language and thought, we often end up taking thoughts literally, treating them as if they were the same as the experiences they describe. If our thoughts are left unchecked, we lose sight of the fact that the mind produces thoughts in the form of images and words. Instead, we see them as real physical things that can threaten our very being.
