The Wisdom of Anxiety

by Sheryl Paul

  We’ll delve more deeply into these scenarios in chapter 9 (The Realm of Thoughts), but you can see that these are the symptoms of anxiety — the thoughts, physical sensations, and behaviors (Googling in response to anxiety is a compulsive behavior) — and then there’s the interpretation: “This must mean that I don’t want to be in this relationship” or “This must mean I don’t want this baby.” When working with anxiety, it’s essential to differentiate between the symptoms and the meaning we assign to those symptoms. Therefore, the more clearly you understand the symptoms of anxiety, the more readily you’ll be able to name it, then approach it through the lens of curiosity and compassion without jumping to the top-layer interpretation.

  Again, as much as the word anxiety is commonplace in today’s world, many people don’t know what the thoughts, feelings, and sensations are that indicate anxiety. Whatever we don’t understand leads to more anxiety. If someone had told me that night I ended up in the ER after my first panic attack that I was suffering from anxiety, it would have saved me months of agony on top of the initial agony of trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Of course, there was nothing wrong with me; my soul had just brilliantly sent me the message through the messenger of panic that it was time to begin the process of individuating and breaking through the layers of my conditioned self. I wouldn’t have expected the ER doctor to say, “Welcome, you’ve just entered your dark night of the soul.” But if he had sent me on my way with information about what was happening, it would have been easier for me to arrive at the why.

  Following are the most common mental, physical, and behavioral manifestations of anxiety.

  INTRUSIVE THOUGHTS

  •What if I’m with the wrong partner?

  •What if I’ve missed my calling?

  •What if I hurt someone?

  •What if I hurt a child?

  •What if the world ends?

  •What if I have a terminal illness?

  For an extensive list of intrusive thoughts, see p. 122.

  SOMATIC SYMPTOMS

  •tightness in chest

  •constricted throat

  •shallow breath

  •antsy feeling in body — like you can’t sit still

  •insomnia

  •dry mouth

  •headaches — including pressure in the head

  •muscle aches

  •general feeling of dis-ease

  •rapid heartbeat

  •sweating

  •pit in stomach

  •digestion issues

  •lightheadedness

  BEHAVIORAL SYMPTOMS

  •anger

  •irritation

  •addictions

  •perfectionism

  •incessant talking

  •compulsive rituals, including online activity, in an attempt to seek reassurance

  This is by no means an exhaustive list (it is quite extraordinary how many symptoms are manifestations of anxiety), but these are the most common ways that anxiety manifests in my worldwide cross section of clients and course members.

  Origins of Anxiety

  The roots of anxiety can be traced to a multitude of places — from family history, to the influence of school and religious culture, to global/cultural/societal messages. When you understand some of the origins of your anxiety, it helps to normalize it, which then softens the shame-based belief that having anxiety means that there’s something wrong with you.

  We know now that anxiety has a genetic component and that if one or both of your parents struggled with anxiety, you’re more likely to experience anxiety as well. Not only does the predisposition toward anxiety live in your genetic makeup, but what we see role-modeled in our early life at home is also more powerful than what we’re explicitly taught. In other words, if you witnessed one or both caregivers struggling with anxiety or chronic worry without seeing them take measures toward learning how to attend to it effectively, you likely absorbed that pattern. When I ask clients if either of their parents were anxious the answer is always yes.

  It’s important to state that even if you come from a long line of chronic worriers and one or both of your parents struggles with anxiety or depression, you’re not destined to live with anxiety for the rest of your life. While this information can help you understand where you come from, it doesn’t have to determine where you’re going. One of the tentacles of the anxious mind is the belief that you’ll always struggle with anxiety, that you’ll never feel good and clear. The anxious mind tends to think in black-and-white, all-or-nothing terms, which means when you’re using words like never and always, you know you’re caught in anxiety’s spell. As you’re reading through this book, I encourage you to notice how the doom-and-gloom voice appears and try to meet it with another part of your brain that can say something like, “My past doesn’t define my future. When I start to shine the light of accurate information and gentle awareness on these painful patterns, I can set myself on a new trajectory.”

  On one level, anxiety is sensitivity gone awry. This means that if your sensitive nature (and, again, everyone is sensitive at the core) wasn’t met with gentleness and kindness, and your parents didn’t know how to guide you through the big feelings of life (sadness, anger, jealousy, loneliness, disappointment, frustration, to name a few) and offer rituals or practices to help you navigate through the awareness of death but instead shamed you with messages like, “Get over it” or dismissed your big feelings because they had no idea how to tend to them (having never learned how to tend to these feelings inside themselves), the sensitivity had no choice but to morph into anxiety. In this sense, anxiety is a defense mechanism to protect you from the vulnerability of experiencing the raw feelings of being human. Anxiety, as a mental state, causes you to travel out of your heart and into the safe chambers of the mind. It was a brilliant defense mechanism that once served you well.

  When I work with adult clients struggling with anxiety, I’ll often ask, “Did you struggle with anxiety or worry as a child?” The answer is almost invariably yes. Interestingly, the trajectory of the manifestations of anxiety and intrusive thoughts often follows the same path: It starts as worry about something happening to their parents (“What if my mom dies?”), then shifts into intrusive thoughts about sexuality (“What if I’m gay/straight?”). To clarify here: someone who orients primarily toward heterosexuality will perseverate on the gay spike, and someone who is gay will attach onto the straight spike. It’s also essential to understand that obsessive thoughts about sexual orientation have nothing to do with sexuality but are the mind’s attempt to find certainty when anxiety has taken over. Seeking reassurance to try to answer this question will only reinforce the anxiety; it must be addressed at the root. From the sexuality spike the anxiety will then morph into health anxiety. And finally, when clients reach my virtual doorstep, they’re in the throes of relationship or pregnancy anxiety or career anxiety. The story lines shift, but the underlying need is the same — to find certainty and safety — and it begins with the child feeling adrift on the sea of an ever-changing and overwhelming emotional life without the solid guidance of adult caregivers to hold them through the feelings until the child is able to do it themselves.

  Alongside family history, there are many facets to the school system that engender anxiety, like the social pressure to conform and the academic pressure for high achievement. Furthermore, at least 20 percent of children have a learning style that is at odds with the expectations of school — children who need to move while they’re learning instead of being forced to sit still, kids who are visual-spatial thinkers instead of the auditory-sequential style that schools favor, kids who are introverts and need to learn in a quiet environment instead of in a loud and crowded classroom. After many years or even days of being in a system that is out of alignment with their rhythm and temperament, children adopt the belief that there’s something wrong with them, that they’re broken in some way, or that they’re not smart. All of which lead to
anxiety.

  Religion, while often offering a sense of trust in something bigger than ourselves, can also transmit the message of basic wrongness, especially around thoughts, bodies, and sexuality. When children are raised with a belief system that tells them, “If you think certain thoughts (primarily around sexuality) you have sinned,” it’s a setup for anxiety. Religion can also truncate one’s basic sense of self-trust in that it often encourages people to place their trust exclusively in a source outside of themselves. Clients who were raised religiously and are now struggling with making a major life decision, like choosing a life partner, will often say, “What if it’s not in God’s plan?” This fear stems directly from the belief that there’s a right and wrong way of living, and that if you don’t get it right, you’re destined to a life of misery and shame. This is a highly anxiety-provoking mindset.

  Lastly, the media culture at large transmits anxiety in spades. Everywhere we look, we receive the message, “You’re not okay. You’re doing it wrong. The world is not okay. You’re not safe.” Now more than ever we’re exposed to mindsets and images of fear, negativity, scarcity, and catastrophe on a twenty-four-hour cycle. Every time you turn on the news, you’re inundated with images of disaster. Every time you look at your screen, you read about that latest political, social, or environmental downturn. Every time you see an advertisement or scroll through social media, the part of you that feels like you’re not enough is activated. If part of the definition of anxiety includes the sense or belief that you’re not safe, our culture has exploited this primal need to feel safe to the hilt and has created a system where we’re addictively plugged in. Fear is addictive. Negativity hooks. Preying on insecurity sells. It’s a vicious cycle: the more anxious we are, the more we plug in to screens, news, and technology; and the more we plug in, the more anxious we feel.

  Mainstream culture, through the vessel of our screens, keeps us chronically off-kilter with the pervasive sense that we’re doing it wrong. One night my son was telling me that he overheard a friend lie about her age at a birthday party, saying that she was older than she was. He asked me why she would do this, and I said, “When you’re younger, the world is pressuring you to be older; and when you’re older, the world tells you to look and act younger. The message is that you’re never okay the way you are.”

  How could anyone feel anything other than anxious when these are the messages being poured daily and even hourly into our psychological water?

  PRACTICEA MEDIA DIET

  To this end, one of the most effective and immediate actions you can take to temper anxiety is to go on a media diet. This means making a commitment to eliminate all social media and the news from your daily mental diet for the next thirty or more days. If that seems impossible, do it anyway. While couched in a facade of facilitating connection, social media is almost entirely focused on externals, and it’s nearly impossible to go on Facebook or the news without viewing multiple horrors throughout the world and comparing ourselves to others in some way. If Facebook is a way that you communicate with friends, pick up the phone instead. And instead of texting, try calling your loved ones, or having conversations in person when possible. Texting isn’t talking, and although it gives you the temporary fix of connection, it doesn’t serve the bigger goal of filling yourself with healthy, meaningful connections and actions, both internal and external.

  Anxiety Is Not a Game of Whac-A-Mole

  When anxiety is pervasive, it takes over all your systems: body, mind, heart, and soul. In acute states of anxiety, adrenaline floods the body, which then creates the feeling that you’re always on high alert, ready to fight or run from danger. In nonacute, pervasive states, anxiety manifests through chronic issues like muscle pain, headaches, difficulty getting a full breath, and insomnia. In the mental realm, my clients who struggle with intrusive thoughts describe it as a twenty-four-hour hamster wheel where they’re constantly stuck on a specific thought, endlessly attempting to find an answer to create certainty. Because it is fundamentally a mental state, generalized, chronic anxiety causes people to shut down to their emotional lives, which then causes a state of numbness or emptiness. And on the level of soul, when we don’t heed anxiety’s attempts to reach us consciously, our dreams and nightmares, speaking in the language of metaphor and symbol, become the messengers of psyche.

  Again, the mainstream model seeks to address anxiety at the level of symptom, which means trying to get rid of the symptom. But even if you can eradicate the symptom, anxiety will find another way to grab your attention. Remember: anxiety is the soul’s way of communicating that something inside is awry, out of balance, or needs attention. When you ignore or remove the symptom, you miss the message, and your inner self will redouble its efforts to alert you to the need to turn inward by sending out more alarming and attention-grabbing thoughts, feelings, or physical symptoms. This is anxiety’s game of Whac-A-Mole: if you whack down one mole (symptom) without addressing it from the root, another mole (symptom) will quickly appear in its place. Eventually the physical symptoms, addictions, or mental torture will reach a breaking point, and you’ll have no choice but to heed the call to turn inward. At this point you’ll be asked to find the courage to shift your mindset and, instead of resisting and resenting the anxiety, you can choose to approach it with curiosity, compassion, stillness, and even gratitude.

  Four Key Elements: Curiosity, Compassion, Stillness, and Gratitude

  There are four key elements that will help you on your path of healing from anxiety. I’m using the word key here intentionally, since the heroine or hero who embarks on a journey of the Self always does so with internal allies and amulets that offer help and guidance along the way. In myths and fairy tales, these helpers appear as animals, mythical creatures, or magical items that are symbols for the inner resources of strength and health that every human possesses. If anxiety is the call that leads you into the dark forest, the following inner keys are the allies and amulets that light the way.

  The first key to unpacking anxiety is to make a conscious shift from protecting against, pushing away, and hating your pain to becoming curious about your inner world. This is not a onetime shift, but a daily, if not hourly, reset and reminder of setting the compass of your intention to the dial of curiosity. In order to do this it’s essential to understand that the initial thought — be it “What if I don’t love my partner?” or “What if I hurt my baby?” or “What if I have a terminal illness?” — is the distress flare; it’s your inner self sounding the alarm bell. It’s all the parts of you that you swept into the basement of your psyche — the messy, dark parts that struggle with uncertainty and lack of control — clamoring for your attention. It’s become overcrowded down there, and it’s time they come out. If you take the thoughts at face value instead of becoming curious about the deeper messages, you will miss the opportunity for healing. But when you recognize the thought as an alarm bell, you can become curious about the places inside that need your attention.

  For example, a coaching client scheduled a session to talk about her conflict around moving back to her home country with her husband and six-month-old baby or staying in the United States. The obsessive thought, which sounded like, “We should move back, otherwise my daughter will grow up to be a horrible human being,” had been elevated to a place of obsession where it dominated her thoughts night and day and was causing immense amounts of anxiety and aloneness. Taken at face value, her conflict seemed reasonable enough: she wanted her daughter to be raised around her extended community — her mother, sisters, and cousins — the way she herself had been raised; instead she was raising her daughter in the isolation of a big city. But when a question becomes obsessive and fear based, as evidenced by the fear that if they didn’t move home, her daughter would grow up to be a horrible person, we know we’re in the realm of anxiety and that the question itself is carrying storehouses of gold that need our attention. If we try to answer the question in the way the culture recommends — making pros
and cons lists, asking people for advice, obsessively thinking about it — we remain caught in our heads. We not only miss the deeper wisdom about ourselves that is waiting to be gleaned, but we also eclipse the opportunity to find true direction based on deeper knowing. As Einstein famously said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it,” meaning that when we try to find an “answer” about an anxiety-related question from an anxious place, we only create more anxiety.

  For the first part of the session, I encouraged my client to take her focus off the presenting question. This was difficult to do since she had been perseverating on the question for months, so had developed well-worn neural pathways in her brain that reinforced the message that answering it was a matter of life and death. This is how anxiety works: it hooks into a question or theme like a dog with a bone, and you become hell-bent on answering it in the belief that if you could only answer this one question, you would find peace.

  But as we spiraled in and dropped down out of the realm of thoughts, my client began to make connections. She could see that the thought had taken on mythic proportions the moment she got pregnant — as often happens in transitions — and she could see many areas embedded in the thought that needed her attention: her grief about being far from home and attending to a layer of sadness that she had moved away ten years earlier in order to preserve her sense of self; the longing to return home as a metaphor for her longing to return to her internal home as she made sense of some painful aspects of her childhood; her grief about leaving her daughter to go back to work; and more. Once she attended to these areas, she could make a decision based on clarity instead of frantic anxiety. Once the messages encased in anxiety are discovered, the initial thought dissolves and clarity is achieved.