Moving through anxiety
Anxiety is a normal emotion. It is the universal feeling of unease that you experience when a situation is challenging and has an uncertain outcome – when you don’t know what is going to happen.
Anxiety is among our most basic emotions. It accompanies our built-in, biological “fight-or-flight” response. Arguably, the human mind’s most important job is keeping us alive. When the mind perceives a situation as a potential risk to our well-being, such as a threat to our health, our fight-or-flight response kicks in as our brain and body try to prepare us to respond to the threat.
Is happy “normal”?
Many people believe that the healthy or “normal” emotional state for a human being is to be “happy”. Early in life, we were repeatedly exposed to stories ending “…and they lived happily ever after”. That is a myth. We all know that life is often messy, difficult, and painful. Unpleasant emotions like anxiety, fear, sadness, anger, and grief are all normal responses to the different kinds of situations that life brings to all of us. Experiencing these feelings does not mean that we are defective. Rather, it means we are normal. It often means we are living a full and meaningful life.
Many factors influence an individual’s vulnerability to anxiety. Yet, what often transforms normal levels of anxiety into a disabling disorder is not anxiety itself. Rather, it is how we think about and respond to anxiety. Since anxiety is unpleasant and most of us have been taught that it is a “negative” (translate that as “bad”) emotion, we often do all sorts of things in an attempt to get rid of our anxiety. This rarely works out well.
We cannot rid ourselves of a “normal” emotion. The mind resists letting go of an emotion that is part of our hard-wired fight-or-flight survival response. Actually, our attempts to get rid of anxiety often make it worse. The more we fight and struggle to get rid of our anxiety, the more anxious, frustrated, and even depressed we can become.
What can we do instead? What is a healthier approach to anxiety? It often helps to remind ourselves that anxiety is a normal emotion. Feeling anxious does not mean we are “crazy” or defective. Anxiety is unavoidable. We all feel it. We are all in this together.
Make room for anxiety
Instead of trying to make anxiety go away, consider becoming more open to it. This does not mean you have to like the feeling. Rather, it means you are willing to “make room” for anxiety…to notice it and to name it -- “I’m feeling anxious.” We are usually far better off when we can accept and honor our feelings, even unpleasant ones, than when we desperately try to avoid or suppress them -- sometimes making choices that take us away from the life we want to live and the person we want to be.
To paraphrase Miriam Greenspan, a well-known psychotherapist and author of Learning to Walk in the Dark, “After years of being taught that the way to deal with painful emotions is to get rid of them, I’ve learned that it’s better to sit with them instead.” Often, the healthiest way past is through.
By Dr. Siquilla Liebetrau,
Bowen Health VP of Clinical Services
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