What I want you to know about anxiety
To be anxious is to be human but what’s really going on behind it?
Feeling anxious? You’re not alone, loves. Anxiety, stress, panic attacks… doesn’t it feel like everyone is suffering?
Well, in some ways we are. But why? And what can we do about it?
Anxiety is the most hardwired and ancient human response we have, but where it was once needed for immediate life-or-death situations, these days it’s more usually powered by the threat or idea of danger.
How anxiety works
Pretend you’re an ancient human. You come face to face with something that might eat or kill you and what happens? Your heart will race, your palms will sweat, your stomach will churn ready to puke or poop out anything that will slow you down and you’ll be off like a shot. That’s a completely appropriate reaction and you’d be pleased to escape.
This is fight or flight and we still do it. When faced with danger, we move from our nice, positive, problem-solving intellectual part of the brain into our more negative, primitive emotional brain. Our amygdala kicks in and we can only react in certain ways, such as anger to strengthen ourselves for a fight and anxiety to run away. These are our primitive get-out clauses.
Without this reaction to extreme dangers, we would not have survived as a species. We can’t see the bear and think, “Oh, it’s probably already eaten!” Nooooooo. We need to believe we are lunch. We need anxiety and negative thinking to keep us safe. Our primitive emotional brain is all about keeping us safe and it’s really good at it. What it’s not so good at is tempering a response to the severity of the threat. An activated amygdala will react almost the same to ‘a bear is about to eat me’ situations as it would to a modern ‘I’m in my overdraft again’ moment. And that’s where we can come unstuck.
Sure, modern life is stressful and there’s a lot to be anxious about: constant distractions from emails, texts and social media, genocide, war, a global pandemic, austerity, child poverty, the cost of living crisis reality, unhinged politicians, environmental doom…. I won’t go on. I bet your heart rate has risen and your mood has dipped just reading that list. And that’s the thing about anxiety. It’s often a problem of our thoughts more than of our reality.
Every negative thought we have is converted and stored as anxiety. Hypnotherapists like to use the metaphor of the stress bucket. That’s where our anxiety sits. Every worry about whether you will ever get a job or a new job, or a better job, or make friends, buy a house, find a partner is a drop into the bucket. When you ruminate about the past, it’s filling up the bucket. Watch the news, hate follow someone on socials, compare yourself unfavourably to others, doom scroll, moan to your mates… yep, you’ve probably guessed it, all drops in the bucket.
But did you also know that your brain can’t tell the difference between imagination and reality? That means every time you play out a scenario in your head, it’s like you have lived it. Every time you think about that upcoming presentation going wrong, that’s more anxiety in the bucket and more stress hormones for your body. What do you think is happening when you are constantly worrying about things in the past or the future? Things you can’t change or might never happen?
Perhaps you’re starting to see just how influential our thoughts are… which can feel deflating when you realise your thoughts are creating or exacerbating your problems. However, it’s actually good news because it means we can flip those thoughts and make the cycle go the other way. The impact of taking control of our thoughts and helping them to become more positive can be huge. But how to manage negative thinking and advice on emptying the stress bucket are worthy of their own posts, so I’ll write more on those later.
For now, this is what I want you to remember about experiencing anxious thoughts and feelings…
You are not fundamentally broken. You are fundamentally human.
Anxiety is just a bunch of negative thoughts. You are so much more than your anxiety and you are not your thoughts.
Changing your language can help you create some distance: instead of saying “I am anxious” (whereby you are are creating an identity for yourself with anxiety at the core) try “I’m experiencing anxiety” or, “I’m having anxious thoughts.”
You have the power (with practice and some patience) to change your thoughts. Although anxiety is a hardwired response that will always be part of the human experience, it doesn’t mean that feeling anxious is destined to be your default setting.
If you are prone to anxiety, you probably have a really great imagination. You can imagine so vividly all the things that might go wrong. What if you started to imagine how it could all go right?
When the stress bucket is really full and you can’t break that anxious pattern of overthinking and sleeping badly, you are probably going to need help to get back on top of things.
Hypnotherapy is excellent for anxiety! If you want to explore getting some help, book a free consultation by emailing emma@haineshypnotherapy.com where I will also explain more about the workings of the brain so you know exactly how you can best help yourself in partnership with me.