Transforming and Harnessing the Power of Anxiety (Part 1) - Taming the Inner River

Ok. Hear me out. We know that for many people anxiety can be a painful and sometimes debilitating experience. It can cause a myriad of intense physical symptoms such as increased heart rate, higher blood pressure, faintness, and shakiness, among many others. It can also create emotional and psychological impacts like decreased confidence and motivation. But what if we could turn the tables on anxiety and tame this scary, intimidating force and turn it into something positive and maybe even helpful?

To use a metaphor, think of anxiety as a raging river. We cannot avoid the fact that the weather systems of life will impact its water flow. But how we respond to this phenomenon, like a well managed dyke system, will dictate whether the water overflows its riverbanks and becomes a destructive force or if it moves smoothly through our life like the nourishing element that water is..

I’m sure all of us would prefer the latter option, so how do we manifest this? It’s all about how we reframe our understanding of what anxiety actually is so that we can shift our relationship to this feeling. 

Anxiety is Energy

Let’s begin, then, with gaining a better sense of what anxiety really is.

When you boil it down, anxiety is just energy, and this energy is felt as sensations in our bodies. To continue using the river metaphor, anxiety is just water. It is not inherently dangerous or toxic. In its most elemental state it is either neutral or life-saving. It is when the forces of life interact with this element, that its energy begins to build. Much like the weather, life events can be rough and turbulent. They interact with the river-like flow of our experience and sometimes things can feel very intense and even overwhelming. Life’s tempests will come and go and not often within our control. But what we can control is how we relate to ourselves and our experience during anxiety-provoking moments.  

How to Relate to our Anxiety: Two Choices

When we come upon a challenging or stress-inducing situation, we have two approaches to choose from: Do we channel our anxiety in a way that is understanding and compassionate so that our emotions can move smoothly through our nervous system and channeled out towards the things we care about? Or do we fight the feeling and dam it up until it overflows in painful, detrimental ways? It is this second scenario we must watch out for. Anxiety increases when we reject our experience. And we do this by creating…stories. 

Anxiety is a Story

Yes! Stories! Humans love stories! Think about all the TV shows that are available to us, and we can’t get enough! Since time immemorial, we sat around the campfire, and we spun very colorful, imaginative tales to try to conceptualize the mysteries of nature. This special ability our species possesses can offer many positive experiences, including amazing inventions and creativity. However, it also has a dark side that can be less than supportive especially in unfamiliar territory. 

Let me explain through an example. If we are in a new situation, let’s say, a new job, we are going to naturally be more alert to our unusual surroundings. This is a useful evolutionary adaptation. In unknown territory, whether we are navigating a new part of the jungle or a new office, if we are more alert, we can respond quicker, and potentially stay safer so that we stay alive longer. Therefore, anxiety can be viewed as simply our inner alert system and a positive survival strategy.

But having to be more watchful and aware requires more energy from our nervous system (what we call stress), and this energy demand is not unlike the rising waters of the river during a rainstorm. Energy increases inside us and we experience our state of alertness as what is called affect arousal. Affect arousal describes the state of feeling awake, activated, and highly responsive to stimuli. During this state our bodies produce more adrenaline to keep us in this wakeful mode and primes us for attuned action if needed. On the physical level, we might experience this state as something similar to the body buzz and jitteriness we get after a cup of coffee.

Looking at it this way, affect arousal and its stress output is simply our nervous system’s attempt at helping us perform as well as possible in our environment. As long as we are within our arousal threshold, there is no danger of overwhelming our inner experience. But if we do go past our arousal threshold then we have crossed over to the emotional realm we call anxiety. And as mentioned above, one of the main forces that pushes our nervous system into feeling anxious is that incredible gift we humans have at spinning tall tales.

To illustrate this, let’s return to our new job scenario. Even before we set foot at the office, many of us might start having scary thoughts and negative projections such as “No one will like me.” Or “I can’t handle this.” With thoughts like these we are creating a narrative about what might happen to us, and it’s by far not a pleasant one! As you can see, these two thoughts exemplify the way we can reject ourselves and our inner experience. Not only is our nervous system on alert because of the new situation we are in (this is the natural ebb and flow of our river system in relation to its environment), but in addition we are brewing more stress and tension by damming up our inner experience with negative thoughts. Outcome: overflow into anxiety, or it’s evil cousin, panic attack.

Ways to Prevent Anxiety

So what are some ways that we could prevent these painful inner storms from overwhelming us with anxiety? Below are some helpful perspectives and practices for you to explore: 

Track your Triggers

The first step in preventing the anxiety flood is tracking your triggers. You can do this by asking yourself what kind of situations cause your arousal level to be heightened? 

Some common examples are: 

• New and unfamiliar situations 

• Experiencing disappointment or disappointing others

• Feeling alone or like you don’t belong

• Feeling limited or that something is out of our control

• Experiencing change or endings

Make notes of what kinds of situations (or people) cause your mind to start spinning into scary, negative stories. The narratives we want to track here are the ones that don’t have any basis in objective reality (i.e. you cannot perceive any data to confirm these worries). 

Lose your mind…In a good way!

Once you have a better sense of the types of situations or experiences that trigger you, you can now start practicing losing your mind. What I mean by this is “get out” of your thoughts and into your body by being mindful of your five senses. To do this you can ask yourself: what is my body feeling right now? 

If you are experiencing hyper-arousal or anxiety, this exercise is very useful in bringing the stress level down, because remember, it is our negative thoughts that cause the water to overflow our arousal banks. But if you reduce the impact these thoughts have on your experience, the situation you are in will be much easier to navigate. 

As you scan your body, check in with each of your senses. What are you feeling, sensing, and experiencing? You will notice a variety of sensations, perhaps some might be uncomfortable, such as increased heart rate, shakiness, or blushing. That’s ok! Because now we are going to apply the next step below.

It’s just temporary energy

As you’re feeling your body sensations, it’s important that you recognize them as just energy. This is quite true because whether you are aroused or in full panic mode, what you are actually experiencing is “just” adrenaline. Adrenaline makes energy in your body.

An important fact about adrenaline is that it actually burns off quite quickly. So try to remember that the energy that is coursing through your body is temporary! On its own it lingers between only 20 minutes and usually no more than an hour in your system. But you can also help adrenaline burn off faster by moving your body. Jog, walk, or even just get up to go to the restroom. Use any excuse necessary to stay present in your body and move it around. 

While adrenaline is pumping, remember to try to keep thoughts to a minimum. Adrenaline causes our brain to hyper analyze the situation. Our brain is essentially saying: “I sense adrenaline pumping so something must be wrong! Even though I can’t perceive any danger in front of me, just in case, I’m going to imagine it!”

You can see the vicious cycle that adrenaline and our brain can create if there is no real and apparent danger in your actual perception. (And trust me if you do perceive actual danger, your body will know what to do with that information! Thanks to adrenaline.)

Keep practicing

It’s important to be patient with this process. Because it truly is a process. Our brain creates very sticky neural pathways that become super habitual over time. When we need to create new neural responses, we often need to create them through repetition. Think of any physical skill that you have learned whether it’s riding a bicycle, learning a new language, or learning a new computer system. The more you do it, the better you get. A mental challenge such as reframing anxiety, works the same way: repetition, repetition, repetition. So as you implement these powerful changes, remember to try to be compassionate with yourself. 

Go Deeper

As part of this new response to anxiety, it can be very helpful to understand why your anxiety triggers got created in the first place. What was it that caused your nervous system to interpret certain situations as potentially dangerous? If you often say to yourself that it’s illogical to feel the anxiety you feel in these types of situations (because rationally you can perceive that you're not in danger), then this tells us that the neural pathways that are causing anxiety were created a long time ago and aren’t applicable anymore. 

It’s often helpful to uncover how far back this response goes in your life. Usually we can then gather clues as to why you needed to have this alert system created in the first place. Our nervous system does not create responses without a reason. As mentioned above, arousal, and therefore, anxiety, is essentially a way of helping us be vigilant. We want to understand what was happening in your past that felt unsafe, vulnerable or overwhelming that prompted your system to decide it needed to create that vigilance to keep you safe or protected. Oftentimes, our brain creates these important protective strategies but it can’t turn them off after their usefulness has worn off. 

However, by inquiring and making conscious the circumstances in our past that created our anxiety triggers, our brain starts to realize that it’s projecting the past onto the present, and past and present are not the same. Over time, this creates a helpful dissonance in our brain, and this dissonance helps us turn off the old alert system that we don’t need anymore.

If you are struggling with feeling overwhelmed, I would be honored to help support you and find a way to relieve your symptoms through holistic therapy. Reach out to me soon.

In part 2 of this blog article I will explain how we can go even further and “flip” our anxiety to uncover what matters most to us and channel energy towards these things in a positive way.