Anxiety
Anxiety is one of our modern plagues. Everywhere, its effects are visibly interfering with our happiness and short circuits our ability to have productive lives. Anxiety limits our connections with others, saps our energy, reduces our focus and skillfulness and undermines our health. Most of us experience significant anxiety at one point or another, some of us more often than others.
The first and most obvious cause of anxiety is uncertainty. We understand our world by the way we move in it, by the way people respond to us and how we can affect things around us. Any significant change that shakes the way we know our world and our place within it, like a natural disaster, the loss of a job, a death or a major change in our physical wellbeing, disrupts our sense of what is real.
When our sense of what is real is disrupted, we can become very uncertain and consequently deeply anxious.
When our view of our world suddenly changes, our sense of who we are and how to make things work no longer fits with what is happening. One minute we are active people engaged in building our lives in a particular direction. We are parents, spouses, people with jobs, neighbors who help other neighbors, athletes, you-name-it. Suddenly those roles are either substantially altered or they no longer function in a way that we can make sense of.
So much is different and we don't know how we are going to reestablish ourselves in the midst of that difference. We don't know how to relate to the world around us. We struggle to find our way, to make sense of what we can do, now. We are often told that as we sort things out and come to terms with our injury or illness we will develop a new way to respond to our lives and reduce our anxiety. Over time, this new response may happen and may help us to reduce our anxiety, but this readjustment may not happen as easily and might take longer than we hope it will.
Our friends and families and our medical professionals tend to see this first cause of anxiety, the disruption of our worldview and its resolution, as part of the healing journey. We are likely to encounter some understanding, patience and support for our dealing with this, at least for the time.
The second and third sources of anxiety may be less obvious to others and ones for which we find less understanding, both from those around us and in ourselves.
Stimulation winds us up and continuous stimulation keeps us wound up. The wind-up is physical as well as psychological. Muscles tighten into knots. Shoulders hunch. Our brains begin to hard wire patterns of response. Anxiety grows. We cope by becoming more and more alert. There is a pervasive but undefined sense that something is wrong and about to get much more wrong unless we do something. We don't know what to do exactly and alertness increases as we try to figure out what we must do. We respond with alertness because we believe that if only we pay more attention and anticipate what will go wrong, the unknown threat will be averted. The problem with this approach, of course, is that the more alert we become, the more susceptible to over stimulation we become.
We live in a culture that is constantly stimulating. These sources of stimulation and the resulting wind-up can be addictive. Our bodies learn to make a habit of staying alert and being anxious. Because the wind-up has become a habit, reducing stimulation may, at first, feel uncomfortable.
The deliberate management of this heightened sensitivity can be an essential part of our self care.
The third cause of anxiety is the disconnection between the expectations of other people and our actual capacity. As we heal, we may look far more able than we actually are. Our disability may be hidden.
Doing what we used to do, or what other people can do, may be either not possible or significantly harder for us now. We may not understand or accept our exhaustion when we try to keep up.
When we cannot perform to our own expectations we experience frustration and confusion, judging ourselves harshly in an attempt to meet a standard that is unrealistic. This gap between what we can do and what we feel we must do produces anxiety.
The first step in dealing with any source of anxiety is quieting the mind and body. Anxiety revs up our nervous systems. The more revved up we get, the harder it is to stop.
As we quiet our minds and bodies, the next step is finding emotional support from a group of peers or a counselor who specializes in dealing with our particular challenges. Being with people who have walked a mile in our shoes teaches us compassion for ourselves, just as we are. It helps us see ways we can grow our abilities and find creative solutions to our challenges.
Psychology Today
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