Anxiety and How to Manage It
Anxiety is unsettling by definition. It changes everything from how you digest food, the quality of your sleep, your ability to think clearly and freely, and how you relate to others. It strongly influences the decisions you make and can so easily shut down whole areas of your life.
You know that much. What you really want to know is how to get rid of it. My clients ask me this all the time.
As a counsellor, I think I tend to have an unpopular view of things, sometimes. When I hear someone ask me how to get rid of their anxiety, to me that sounds like, “Can you please cut off my arm? It’s just not strong enough. And my hand really sucks at opening jars. The hand can go, too.” Because actually, anxiety is a very important part of our whole selves. When anxiety gets too big, when it’s out of balance, it is absolutely miserable. It feels like a massive roadblock to living a good life. When anxiety is in balance with our whole selves, then it has the potential for being useful.
Let me stand back and paint you a larger picture of your whole self (in a very simplified sort of way). Then we can see where anxiety fits in.
Dr. Dan Siegel MD talks about a Window of Tolerance. We all have the ability to be fully present in the world. This “window” is the zone where we really notice the smell of flowers. We hear the fly buzzing against the window pane. We are aware of what we are feeling, which might be sad, happy, excited, frustrated, hungry, or anything else. If we are in the window, that means that life is manageable enough for us to stay present. It is only in this window that we have full access to our whole selves! This is the space where we make our best decisions and connect best to the people around us.
However, nearly every day there is something that is a bit or a lot too much for us. When anything feels like too much, we have two systems ready to help us check out and take some distance from what’s going on. To really simplify things, we can call these the anxiety system (more technically, the sympathetic nervous system) and the depression system (parasympathetic nervous system/dorsal vagal system). If we really boil things down to the basics, anxiety and depression are signals that you are out of your window, meaning, something is kind of unmanageable right now.
Have you ever had a morning when you turn off your alarm and go back to sleep unintentionally? That alarm was there for a reason—to wake you up. If you turn off the alarm without getting up, you miss the purpose of the alarm. (And you might lose your job.) If you are experiencing anxiety, there’s a reason. If we try to turn off the anxiety without also learning what else is going on, it often gets even louder or takes another form, like illness.
There’s a funny thing to know about anxiety. Sometimes, anxiety seems like it’s an alarm about one thing, when it’s actually hiding something else. Humans are beautifully complex! And perplexing. Remember that anxiety is a way to avoid being present. Sometimes, anxiety very intelligently and sneakily says, “I’m not just going to raise his heart rate. That isn’t working. I’ll also have him become really focused on germs (or spiders, or losing her job, or a relationship, or food, or . . .). Then, having this other thing to focus on will help him avoid the real problem. That’ll be great!”
How do you manage anxiety? Part of that process involves learning that it might be okay to be more present. Life might be more okay than you expect. Another part is exploring why the alarm is going off in the first place. Sometimes, we kind of know what we need to do and are able to take steps on our own. Usually, we benefit from some counselling support. Humans were designed to do things together. Our counsellors can help.