Anxiety Happens, page 8
Have a seat at a table and place a pen in front of you. Now, we’d like you to try to pick up the pen. Try as hard as you can. Go ahead and try it. If you find yourself picking up the pen, stop! That isn’t what we asked you to do. We want you to try to pick it up.
After some effort, you’re probably thinking, “Well, I can’t do that. Either I pick it up or I don’t.” You’re right. There’s no way to try to pick up the pen and at the same time actually pick it up.
You may have noticed that your hand was stuck hovering over the pen when you tried to pick it up. That’s what trying gets you. You end up hovering over things in your life and not doing what you wish to do—like when you try to lose weight, try to get more exercise, try to do a better job, try to be a better lover, try to be a more responsive parent, try to be more organized, try to be a better listener, or try to be less anxious. Trying just leaves you hovering, in a state of paralysis, and stuck.
Trying is really a form of “not doing.” You must first make a choice about whether you’re willing to do something. If you are completely willing rather than just a bit willing, then go ahead and do it. And if you aren’t willing, then don’t do it. Remember, willingness has an on-off switch, not some type of dial you can move up or down a little.
Responsibility for flipping your willingness switch rests with you. It’s time to face this stark truth squarely. Your behavior is something you can control––even when you’re in the grip of powerful emotions like anxiety and fear. This is good news.
You don’t have to feel willing in order to act with willingness. That’s because willingness isn’t a feeling. So when we encourage you to be willing, we aren’t asking you to change how you feel. You can still think that your anxieties are unpleasant and dislike them. With willingness, we’re asking you to make a choice. That choice is to be with your anxieties when they show up and do what matters to you.
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Exercise Kindness
Many people are troubled by difficult emotions and thoughts but lack the skills to deal with them. They think that the best thing to do is to fight back. This natural inclination is a source of needless suffering.
A far more effective and skillful way to approach any harsh energy is to meet it with loving-kindness. This means that you treat your mind and body with friendliness, gentleness, equanimity, and, dare we say it, love. When you do that, emotional pain and suffering will have no room to grow and take over your life.
Kindness itself is simple and yet hard for most people. But don’t let that stop you. You can learn to be kind with yourself. Just as people work out to build muscle, your kindness muscle requires regular use and practice. This muscle will grow stronger over time. You can start building your kindness muscle daily whenever you find yourself walking.
This next exercise builds on the Mindful Walking practice you did earlier (see Chapter 13), but with an important twist. The twist involves walking with loving-kindness in your mind and heart.
Walking with Loving-Kindness
For this practice, all you need to do is walk at a normal pace, inside or outside. As you walk, silently repeat a meaningful phrase or mantra—one that reflects a loving-kindness intention and wish for yourself. Keep it simple—such as “May I have peace,” “May I be kind to myself,” “May I experience joy,” or “May I be free of needless suffering.” Listen to your heart.
Before moving on, come up with your own personal phrase:
“May I .”
As you walk and move, silently repeat your personal loving-kindness phrase. When something or someone outside of you grabs your attention, notice what it is, and then silently extend your personal phrase to that object, person, or creature. So, if a tree catches your attention, you would silently extend your phrase to that tree—for example, “May this tree have peace.” If it’s a stranger, do the same. If it’s a memory, thought, or feeling, do the same. If it’s an animal, car, or some other object, do the same. If this seems odd or strange, that’s okay. Just continue extending the phrase to anything that catches your attention.
Then, after you silently extend your personal loving-kindness phrase to whatever grabbed your attention, bring your awareness back to yourself, and continue to walk as you repeat your kindness mantra silently to yourself (“May I…”). Repeat this process of extending your phrase to yourself and then to anything that pulls your attention and back to yourself for as long as you wish.
When you face difficulty in your daily life, this practice is a simple and empowering way to soften the blows. Start with making a daily intention to practice when you’re walking, and then when you find yourself sitting or waiting in line. Do the practice with an open mind, and let go of any attachment to getting a specific outcome. Over time and with practice, loving-kindness will become more of a habit in your daily life.
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Don’t Feed It
Everything you’ve been learning and practicing up to this point is to prepare you to live your life when life gets hard, and especially when you feel anxious or afraid. That’s because you’re different now. You’re armed with a new perspective that’ll help you create the kind of life you wish to live, anxiety or not. But that doesn’t mean you won’t be pulled into old ways. The trick is to learn how not to feed anxiety and fear when and if they do show up, because they probably will.
Think of your anxieties as a hungry tiger cub, a pet that lives with you in your home. She’s so cute, but a little bit scary too. So, to keep the tiger happy, you make sure she gets lots of meat. And you keep feeding her and feeding her, wanting to keep her happy. But deep down you’re also scared that she might bite you, or worse, see you as dinner.
Each time you feed her, she quiets down and leaves you alone for a bit. But over time, she grows, and grows, and grows. Now she’s not so cute. She’s loud, difficult to manage, and always hungry. In fact, she’s frightening.
But you keep feeding her. And while she eats, she leaves you alone. But she keeps growing. Back and forth, over and over, the same drama plays itself out. You hope that one day she’ll finally leave you alone and for good.
Yet the tiger doesn’t leave—she just gets louder and scarier and hungrier. And then one day you walk to the fridge, you open the door, and the fridge is empty. At this point, there’s nothing left to feed to the tiger—nothing, except you!
The lesson here is simple. When you’re faced with your anxiety tiger, don’t feed it. Stop doing what you’ve always done. Instead, do something radically different from what you’ve done before! That’s it.
But we also know that simple doesn’t mean easy. You might even be thinking, “Well, that’s all well and good, but how do I do that?” Here are a few bits of advice to help tame your tiger of anxiety and fear so it doesn’t consume you.
Taming the Anxiety Tiger
Choose what you attend to and do. Everything else pivots on this one. You can choose to attend to and listen to what the anxiety tiger tells you, and to do as it says. Or you can choose to watch all the activity from an observer perspective, without buying into it, and act with your mouth, hands, and feet, guided by your values. Remember, anxiety is a part of you, but there’s much more to you and your life than that.
Acknowledge what’s happening anyway. Anxiety happens. Remember that it’s not a choice. But you do have a choice in how you respond to it. You can choose to feed it or you can choose to get curious about it, open up to it, and let it be. Like waves on the ocean, it will pass.
Do the opposite of what anxiety compels you to do. When the anxiety tiger tells you to stay put, sitting on your hands, you get up. When you’re compelled to turn away, you get curious and lean in. When you’re inclined to freeze, you move. When you feel like you’re losing touch or you find yourself lost in the past or future, you take a rich grounding breath and bring your awareness back to where you are right now. When you find yourself agitated, you allow yourself to sit still with the energy inside. As you’ve learned before, doing the opposite of what your anxieties and fears command is a powerful way to take back control over your life.
Be kind and gentle with yourself. Above all, practice being gentle with yourself. This is not the time to start another tug-of-war with your anxiety. In a way, being gentle and kind is the exact opposite of warfare. This is why it can be so powerful. Just don’t use it as a clever way to make the anxiety go away. If you do that, you’ll likely just find yourself right back where you started and caught in another war, except using a new set of weapons. The kindness exercises you’re learning in this book will help you develop a new relationship with your mind, body, and experience.
We realize it can be difficult to leave your old ways behind and adopt a new approach. But here’s the deal: You’re the master and creator of your life. The anxiety tiger has no power unless you feed her and give her that power. This is one place where you can take control and make a real difference in your life.
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Body Surfing Emotions
When waves approach a group of birds floating on the water, you’ll notice that the birds don’t fly away. They bob up and down as they ride up the facing slope, round the top, and drift down the long backside of the wave. You can learn to do this with your anxieties too.
All emotions are wavelike and time limited. They ebb and flow like waves—they build up, eventually reach a peak, and drift away. Anxiety and fear come and go in a similar way. They don’t last forever, even if it feels as if they will.
When you’re experiencing strong emotions, the waves are tall and scary. You may feel that they’ll go on forever and overwhelm you, or that you may drown. But that’s the old anxiety talking. You decide not to listen, and just keep on riding.
Like the birds on the water, you can simply stay and do nothing. That may seem impossible, but you can still choose to stay and do the opposite of what your anxiety is commanding you to do. We know how difficult this is without some experiential practice on your part.
So we encourage you to do the following exercise to prepare you for challenging moments when you’re faced with anxiety waves. In your mind and with your imagination, right now you have a chance to learn to stay on the wave of your anxiety and fear, ride it out, and see what happens.
Riding the Waves
Think of a recent situation when you felt afraid, panicky, nervous, worried, or upset. Visualize the scene and remember how you felt. Pause for a while.
Keep focusing on the upsetting scene and imagine that it’s an ocean wave as it approaches you near the shoreline. It looks far too big for you and is very scary. Notice the worry, disconcerting thoughts, and maybe images of disaster too. Keep focusing on the upsetting scene as well as on the judgments you make about it, about you, and about what’s happening inside you.
Now observe what your body might be doing. Notice the sensations and how your mind evaluates them. Simply label them all: “I am noticing .” Notice the sensations of warmth and of tightness. Just let your body and mind do their thing.
Do the same with worries, other thoughts, and images that show up—the old story line. Acknowledge their presence without trying to control them, change them, or push them away. Label them and keep watching your mind and body.
Be aware of the point where your anxiety wave stops climbing. It has reached its peak, weakens, and starts to recede. You feel the wave leveling off and starting to diminish. Experience the slow ride down the back of the wave. Accept wherever you are on the wave. Don’t try to get past it. It moves at its own speed. Just let go and let it carry you. Eventually, you’ll feel yourself slipping down the back of the wave, the anxiety now quieting.
Anxiety and fear work just like a wave if you don’t try to control or block them. But if you refuse to face and ride out the wave, it’ll throw you back and toss you around like a beach ball. Then you’re caught churning helplessly beneath the surface of the water, at the mercy of the full force of the crushing wave and undertow.
But if you swim or ride with the waves, or at least not against them, they’ll eventually carry you toward the safe shore. The same will happen if you stop fighting your anxiety waves.
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Refocus, Reconnect, and Redirect
If you’ve ever been around a child throwing a tantrum, you know how unsettling that can be. In the heat of the moment, it’s so easy to lose focus, your connection with yourself and other people around you, and even your sense of direction. Anxiety can leave you feeling like that too. You’re at your wits’ end and want it to stop.
With the tantrum, you may have a great urge to respond in anger or with harshness. But this, we know, often makes things worse. In fact, countless studies teach us that these strategies are poor ways to encourage more appropriate behaviors in children. Parents end up feeling bad, tired, and frustrated. Worse, the kids grow up fearing their parents and end up being very hard on themselves and others too.
Other parents and caregivers opt for a more compassionate, yet firm, approach. They refocus and see their child as part of them, not as some alien monster.
Then they move past that first impulse to react with negative energy and punishing behavior, and they reconnect with what they want to be about in this situation. Most parents wish for their children to be safe and secure, and to know kindness and love, so they do their best to respond in ways that show that.
But they don’t just let the kids run the show. They redirect behavior, taking their child in directions the parents want to go and in directions that are best for the child, too.
Research shows that learning to refocus, reconnect, and redirect is a highly effective parenting strategy and a powerful way to find peace during difficulty. You can learn to do the same when your anxiety acts out too. The next exercise will help you do this.
Traveling with My Anxiety Child
Imagine that your anxiety is more like a child—your child—acting out again, throwing a fit. Think about how you normally respond. What’s your parenting strategy? Do you yell, scream, and struggle? If you do, has it worked? Or do you end up feeling worse—frustrated and tired out by the constant nagging? Does your anxiety child respond well to that or continue to act up? Now let’s see what happens as you refocus, reconnect, and redirect.
Refocus—Take a rich grounding breath in and let it slowly out. Now look at this anxiety child of yours and notice that this child is part of you and not you. See if you can look past the negative energy, and see that your anxiety child is looking to you, and only you, for some guidance and care. You know what’s best for this child—and for you too.
Reconnect—Your anxiety child may be hurting and in need of your comfort. Connect with what you’d like to be about in this situation. Do you want to approach your anxiety child with a declaration of war in hand? Or can you reconnect with your anxiety and fear from a place of gentleness, compassion, and kindness? This doesn’t mean you like what your anxiety child is doing. It means that you can still treat your anxiety child in a loving way. Do this because ultimately it’s good for you.
Redirect—Your anxiety child is probably demanding and wants you to stay put or avoid a situation. But you are the one in charge. This is your life. So, in a firm and loving way, you decide to take your anxiety child with you as you do something that matters to you. Your anxiety child may protest, but this is your life. You have the power to choose what you do and where you go. Your anxiety child doesn’t have that power unless you give the child that power.
Perhaps it’s time to refocus, reconnect, and redirect. After all, your anxiety child is a part of you. You can be firm and respond with kindness and love. This is how you cultivate a loving home within yourself so you don’t get sidetracked when your anxiety child acts out. The next time you go out to do something you care about, if your anxiety child decides to show up, say “Come along with me.”
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Moving with Barriers
As you embark on your journey, you’ll find the road full of barriers. Some barriers are external, such as lack of money, competing life demands on your time and resources, limited opportunities, physical or geographical constraints, or even foul weather. You can work through some of these barriers by brainstorming options or by talking with a good friend to get some perspective and fresh ideas. Yet by far the most frequent and tricky barriers that you’ll face are those nagging, pesky anxiety- and fear-related thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, or impulses that have slowed you down in the past.
Your mind will tell you that when a barrier comes up, you should just get rid of it—overcome it. The problem with this strategy is that it awakens your natural inclination to struggle. You know by now that struggling with anxiety and fear doesn’t work well. So when a barrier comes up, you need to listen to and trust your experience, not your mind!
The good news is that you don’t need to get rid of anxiety barriers on your road to living your values. You don’t need to push them aside either. There’s no healthy way to do that anyway. The key is to move with the barriers—take them along for the ride! This is the path to living fearlessly.
You can deal with any anxiety obstacle in the same way that you deal with other thoughts and feelings: You make room for all the unwanted stuff that has been stopping you from doing what’s best for you. You acknowledge that stuff and watch it from your observer perspective. Above all, you let it be, without getting involved with it, and keep on moving in the direction you want to go—all at the same time. The next imagery exercise will help you get in touch with what we mean.
Who’s Driving Your “Life Bus”?
