Calm the Waters On the Inside: Strategies for Managing Anxiety

Anxiety is a symptom of something else.

Anxiety, if you're human, is normal, something we all feel at various points in life. Anxiety isn't bad, but we can get overwhelmed and have complicated relationships with ourselves when we feel bad and feel overwhelmed by that bad feeling, without knowing what to do, as in the case of anxiety. We have a culture that makes us feel bad about our struggles, so many of us still tend to suffer in silence before reaching out for help.

Generally, anxiety's foundation is on thoughts about the future.  

We're human and wired to think about the future. Anxiety is seated in future thoughts/worry. I talked with clients about their 'Future trippings', playfully highlighting the tendency to excessively worry about what might happen in the future. We don't have a crystal ball, despite the ego's fixation.

Anxiety and excitement are two sides of the same emotional experience, but anxiety can generally feel difficult to tolerate. Excitement is the future anticipation of fun, pleasure, joy, and expansion. Excitement is confident; anxiety is unsteady, unsure. Developing confidence in oneself helps to tolerate feelings with a sense of mastery over them so that feelings are recognized as part of you, not letting the feelings become you.

Long-Term Impacts of Chronic Anxiety

Left untreated, unattended to, and unmanaged, anxiety can wreak havoc on our lives. It can lead to avoiding social situations, missing out on opportunities, and even affecting our physical health. If we avoid addressing our anxiety, it can take over our lives, limiting our social connections, our potential impact, and thus our overall well-being.

Insecurity is a form of anxiety. If we're constantly anxious when we are in a relationship, and our anxiety convinces us that our partner doesn't love us, we'll act in ways that sabotage the very thing we want. If we're anxious and believe we're not a good person, we'll act in ways that confirm this belief, staying small and safe in a world that needs our wholeness and authenticity.

Viewed from a different perspective, anxiety can be a call from our inner selves, urging us to get back into alignment with our true values and beliefs. In this sense, anxiety might be a signal to pause, reflect, and make necessary changes. Anxiety, if we can find ways to turn towards it, could be a catalyst for personal discovery.

How Anxiety Originates

Our past experiences, especially traumatic ones, can shape our thinking and lead us to anticipate negative outcomes. We often create mental pictures of these past traumas, hoping to prevent them from recurring. We start anticipating the thing we wish wouldn't happen. Subconsciously, we act in ways to make it come true anyway. By recognizing that we're unconsciously stuck in a pattern, we can take back control and prevent our past from continuously dictating our future.

When we're anxious, we often make anxiety mean something is wrong. Many people make their anxiety mean that something is wrong with them, and the shame can be debilitating. What if I told you that anxiety might not mean any of what you've made it mean?

Our anxiety, like all feelings, is a message from inside, and it offers us valuable insights about ourselves and the world around us. How we interpret these messages affects us. In an empowered perspective, we can learn to view anxiety not necessarily as a problem or flaw, but as a signal that we're about to embark on something new.

Emotional Inheritance

We inherit our anxiety from our families, our lineages, our environments, and our cultures. Some might be anxious about having enough money to pay the bills, a real and terrifying experience that affects lower-income and unhoused populations. Teens might be nervous about interacting with their peers in an overwhelming world that's increasingly competitive and lived online. Immigrants and their communities are currently worried about deportation, not knowing if their loved ones will be suddenly kidnapped and removed from the country. Anxiety shows up in so many ways and areas of life that it would be hard to miss.

If you are lucky, you might have grown up around people who helped you get to know your inner state, and your parents told you anxiety meant you were doing something new. If our parents had unmanaged anxiety, it would affect our own development.

Our parents always do the best they can, and yet, it can often still mean they sometimes got it wrong for what we truly needed. A big step in growing up is recognizing and accepting our parents as flawed humans, and accepting them where they are. If our parents didn't know how to calm their inner waters, it would be beyond their awareness to learn how to help you with yours. That's the nature of it: you can't give what you don't have. And even so, we can still we can heal beyond the places we come from.

When we grew up in an environment that helped us attend to our inner waters, we may develop a reactive response to any feeling by trying not to feel it, through repression, avoidance, or become codependent or people pleasers. If life circumstances and adaptations sculpt us into various coping strategies like avoidance, and we overdo this, we come to avoid ourselves, our knowledge, and inner understanding.

It will always be hard to navigate life when disconnected from ourselves.

When we're so overly focused on getting away from it, we can never learn from it, and our authenticity misses out. The trick of mastering anxiety, like most things, is to shift our orientation towards it. Ask it what it's trying to tell you. Instead of getting away from it, try to get to know it.

Start getting on top of your anxiety

Breathe

Getting back into our bodies and out of our minds is the first step. Anxiety lives in the Mind: overthinking, ruminating, spiraling, catastrophizing, and anticipating something negative. We can get a grip on our anxiety, but stop ourselves in our train of thought by slowing down our nervous system. Take a slow, deep breath. Then do that again and again. Do that for a full minute. Keep going.

Develop Self-Compassion

Inside anxiety, a part of you is calling out for attention, care, and kindness. We're anxious because we care, we're scared, or we want a sense of control. It's hard not to know what will happen, and yet to be alive is to live a certain amount of uncertainty. What a conundrum. Once we accept that anxiety is a part of our world, that it doesn't necessarily mean something is wrong, we can figure out how to be with and tolerate it a little better.

Recognize the Power of the Mind. Loosen Its Grip on You

Recognize that you don't have a crystal ball. The Mind plays a lot of tricks on us, and inside anxiety, the Mind tells us a story about our future experience. There are many times that your Mind has been wrong about what happened, but we tend to be biased in recalling these events. Let the Mind lose its power over you—question how you fill in the gaps of the narrative of your life. Start to get it outside your head, write in your journal. Get to know those inner repetitive stories.

Notice your language

What is the story you tell yourself? You can pay attention to the thoughts while you question them. "I am anxious" has a different effect on you than saying "I have anxious thoughts." "I am an anxious person" ties you to your anxiety. "I have some anxiety about..." lets you be in control, while recognizing that you have anxiety, anxiety doesn't have you. The subtle shift in language has a huge impact. No one is tied to their troubles, unless they tell themselves they are.

Therapy for Anxiety

Psychotherapy can help you better understand the origins of your anxiety and develop the inner capacity to manage it. As you develop tools for managing the day-to-day life, depth-oriented psychotherapy is often a way the anxious part can start to settle down. Once we're safe enough to get to know ourselves through a secure and non-judgmental relationship, the deeper layers of anxiety can reveal their mysteries.

Learning to master your anxiety is a step towards empowerment

Over time, I've seen clients transform their relationship to anxiety. Some finally release negative narratives they internalized about themselves. Other clients find freedom from their shame. For some clients, working on their anxiety helped them uncover more profound wisdom in their intuitive knowing, something they were disconnected from all along.

There is no one way that anxiety manifests in any person. The task is to get to know your relationship to it, find ways to cope while you get to the root of what's not working. Anxiety is just the message. How do we hear and respond to its call?