The Viable Alternative

Oh that damn anxiety!

I’m no expert, but anxiety is a condition that plagues a vast number of people and is something that most people, present company included, would rather do without. In fact, many people are so intent on avoiding it that they’re willing to self medicate via alcohol, sex, drug abuse, co-dependent relationships, violence, workaholicism, over eating, sleeping, etc, etc just to escape that dreadful feeling.

Anxiety and how to get over it was something that I had struggled with years with no success in finding an answer in how to overcome it.

When I’d get anxious, I’d get stuck in my head ruminating the same thoughts over and over again without being able to break the cycle. I’d become overly self-conscious which would cause me to lose any ability I had to interact with people spontaneously, and I’d also be nervous and my body would become stiff.

I’d sometimes remain like this for weeks on end. Doing things like trying to think my way out of it or to try to act “normal” only served to get me more tangled in the sticky web of anxiety. The more I struggled to get out, the tighter the cords became.

Then last year, 2013, one of the toughest years of my life came, and I learned a few things.

I believe that it was the beginning of that year, sometime in January or February, I was starting to spin into another cycle of anxiety, when I began to reflect back on the concept of the human brain that I heard about from one of the scientists. The concept was that the human brain was divided into three parts: the reptilian brain, the mammalian brain, and the largest part, the human brain.

The reptilian part of the brain was responsible for the fight-or-flight-response when we sense or notice danger.

I realized that at that moment when I was spiraling once again into anxiety, it was because on some level my brain sensed some sort of danger.

I then paid attention to my body and noticed that it was inching towards a form that one would take when he’s anxious. My shoulders were pulled up towards my neck, my breathing became shallower, my heart started beating faster and my body was stiffening.

When I paid attention to what was going on in my mind, I noticed that it was going in a direction of self-preservation where it was trying to look for what could go wrong and how to protect me from that, and also for signs of potential threats.

A light bulb went off in my head, and I realized right then and there that by allowing my body to take a certain form that could be interpreted as anxious, and by taking my mind in a certain direction, I was sending the signal to my brain that danger was ahead, and it responded in kind by triggering a flight-or-fight-response which would put me in a state of anxiety.

It’s kind of like if you act nervous or fearful in front of a dog, it would sense something is off and start growling and barking, and if it doesn’t know you it may attack you.

In this case, my reptilian brain was the dog. It saw my body and mind acting a certain way and it started “barking” by triggering the chemicals involved in the flight-or-fight response i.e. anxiety.

It dawned on me that it was in my power to interrupt the signals in my brain by consciously changing what I was doing with my body and my mind. In other words, by doing something different with my mind and body, it would change the messages to my brain that something was wrong, and my brain would relax and not go into alert mode.

Instead of breathing shallow I started taking deeper breaths. I let down my shoulders and loosened my body. Also, I realized that it wasn’t the individual negative thoughts I had that I needed to be concerned with, but more their focus and direction. Whenever my mind would try to go in the area of answering the question, “What’s wrong here?” I’d immediately interrupt it, stopping myself from searching for the answer. By doing this, the negative thoughts took care of themselves.

When I did this, my heartbeat slowed down and the feeling of anxiety started to ebb.

As I started to do this more and more with subsequent incidents where anxiety was about to manifest, I started to pay more attention to thoughts, feelings and environmental factors that would initially trigger me to start acting anxious.

By doing this, I began to realize that the reason I had so much problem in “escaping” my anxiety was because I was trying to escape my anxiety. The mere act of trying to escape my feeling anxious by saying “Oh my goodness, I feel anxious, I gotta get outta this,” told my brain that something was wrong and it would heighten the alert mode which made the feelings of anxiety worse.

In other words, acknowledging to my brain that I felt anxious when I felt anxious made it more anxious, and telling my brain I felt anxious could take the form of thinking a certain way, carrying my body a certain way, breathing a certain way, and behaving a certain way.

A newer area of science called neuroscience acknowledges that the body is the mind and the mind is the body. This means that what goes on in the body is a reflection of what is taking place in the mind and vice versa. My anxious thoughts triggered my body to go into the posture of one with anxiety, and reacting with my body by acting anxious told my brain that I was anxious and caused it go into emergency mode and this became a vicious cycle.

I believe that many of us suffer from anxiety for unnecessarily long periods of time because first of all, we’re not aware of the intimate connection of the mind and body in which what we do in one triggers the other. We’re also not aware of what triggers our thoughts and emotions, and lastly many of us are definitely not aware of how we respond to these thoughts and emotions.

We don’t have to be hapless victims of anxiety. We can definitely control and eliminate it by becoming more conscious of how we respond to the initial events, internal or external, that trigger the anxiety and by changing our subsequent behaviour. We can also take control by becoming more conscious of what our body does when it’s anxious and what the mind focuses on, and adopt new habits to replace the old ones that helped perpetuate the anxiety so that the brain’s emergency mode shuts off.

This is how you take back your internal resources and treasures.

….and this is The Viable Alternative.

Hope this helps.

Ike Love