Do You Deal with Morning Anxiety?
I thought I was the only one who dealt with morning anxiety where as soon as you wake up, you get a flood of negative thoughts and anxious feelings about life which get your day off to a bad start. However, after encountering a number of other people with similar experiences, I’m finding that it’s quite a common occurrence.
The problem is that most people feel completely helpless to it.
My educated guess is it occurs because since the conscious mind is inactive when we’re sleeping and still less active when we’re waking up, it leaves room for the subconscious mind to bring up memories, thoughts and feelings from our past that are usually buried in our subconscious mind.
Then the other part is the fact that we think anxiously because of habit.
As I’ve been on this journey of breaking the habit of being my old self, the morning anxiety I’ve encountered has become a lot easier to deal with.
This is because I’m learning to become more aware of my habitual thought patterns and not reacting to them, feeling the sensations of the emotions in my body without reacting negatively to them, and listening to my body as to what it feels like doing.
For instance, this morning when I first opened my eyes after my alarm went off, I could feel my mind literally looking for thoughts that would cause me to feel fearful, gloomy, discouraged and anxious. I could also feel my body trying to assume the physiology of an anxious person and behave anxiously.
It’s literally like a program that was running me.
In the past, I would normally get swept away by this program where I would go off into a loop of thinking negative thoughts that would trigger anxious feelings which would cause me to think more negative thoughts and on and on, but because I’ve been a lot more self aware in the past several months and have more tools at my disposal, this wasn’t the case this morning.
When I noticed that my brain was throbbing to think negative thoughts, I just simply felt the throbbing without letting myself think the subsequent or accompanying negative thought. At times, I would feel into my heart to feel a “higher” emotion of my choice and direct my mind towards a positive thought or affirmation. After awhile, the energy behind the throbbing dissipated and my body heaved a noticeable sigh.
When I felt the uncomfortable sensations in my body that I had been conditioned to think negatively about and judge, I simply just felt the sensations in whatever part of my body they showed up, and stayed with them without going up into my head to dramatize, judge or make a story about them. After awhile, my body just let go of it through a deep exhale and my body relaxing.
When I would feel my body wanting to hunch or slump over in a defeated, discouraged posture which would send a message to my brain to be anxious, I kept my energy up to disrupt that message. After doing this for some time, my body released the energy behind the impulse to behave this way via another deep exhale.
Also, what I learned recently was that some of the anxiety was due to an unexpressed emotion that I had suppressed in my past because at that time it was “unsafe” to express it. The anxiety I felt was due to my nervous system wanting to express something but me unconsciously holding it back.
When I noticed this coming up, I surrendered to my nervous system and allowed it to express what it wanted to express.
This means that when I felt waves of anger came up, after surrendering to the sensations of it, I was led to grab a towel and twist it until all the anger expressed itself and released. Other times, I would feel the impulse to flail my right arm in the air and after doing that for a few minutes, felt this release of more “anxious” energy. Another time I was led to bounce up and down on my bed while sitting up, and after some time of doing that, I felt more anxious energy release from my body.
There were times when I felt led to say, “I hate everybody” or “Screw this world,” or at another point, “I can do whatever the f*** I want.” I would repeat these phrases out loud quietly but aggressively until I felt all the energy behind that dissipate as well.
It may sound all odd, but it worked.
After about an hour doing all of this in the process of doing my morning routine while I was getting ready for work, that whole wave of impulses to think, feel and act anxiously left me and I felt I was back as the driver of my life.
Now, some mornings, in fact more and more as of recent, I don’t have to go through all this because my mind, on its own, due to my intentional conditioning, shuts down any impulse to think negatively, but this morning wasn’t one of those times because the impulses were a lot stronger.
What I’m learning is that it’s not about eradicating anxiety as much as it is about properly building the capacity within our bodies to properly stay grounded in it and contain it so it doesn’t sweep us away. Subsequently, when the body knows it has the capacity to deal with anxiety, it feels more safe thus reducing the anxiety.
What also helps is the conditioning of the mind to stop thinking the thoughts that trigger the feelings associated with anxiety.
This is The Viable Alternative.
Hope this helps.
Ike Love
