About Anxiety (and how to deal with it)
I started getting panic attacks in my early twenties. The family GP wanted to put me on Valium™. I decided that night I wasn’t going to do that and looked at various alternative therapies, including a prolonged period of worrying about food sensitivities (which makes one neurotic about food). It was some years later when my Canberra GP, who had been a clinical ecologist for a while, was the first mainstream medicine person to say anything useful. He pointed out that the body only has one system for coping with stress. If it is not doing so, a wide variety of symptoms may result (including anxiety disorders). The trick was to improve the body’s ability to cope with stress.
This did not solve the problem immediately, but at least it pointed me in the right direction. Looking back now, that my ability to cope with certain forms of stress might be flawed, and that problems would manifest themselves in anxiety, makes perfect sense given my upbringing.
If I let my blood sugar get too low, or too high by sugaring up, my body tends to produce anxiety-inducing hormones. My body is less likely to do so if I have been doing a reasonable amount of aerobic exercise. (Tai Chi also seems to help and has the advantage of not being strenuous.) These are physical steps to improve the body’s ability to cope with stress. (Good nutrition, exercise: the normal stuff.)
Nowadays, I can recognise the feeling of the urge to be anxious. More importantly, I can separate the impulse to be anxious from actually being anxious. The main trick to dealing with anxiety disorder is to realise that whatever you are actually worrying about is a complete epiphenomenon. The anxiety is chemically induced. The mind, being a great rationaliser, finds something to cognitively “carry” the anxiety. I am feeling anxious, there must be a reason for that, what is worrying me, oh, it must be … Whatever the […] is, is completely irrelevant to dealing with the problem. If you engage with the […] you are lost in the epiphenomenon, wasting resources that could be used to actually deal with the anxiety. Worse, you will reinforce the anxiety, by creating positive feedback.
Which is where Zen and buddhist psychology can help. It provides the basis for gaining critical distance from one’s mental states. Separating the impulse to be anxious from actual anxiety.
It also provides techniques for quieting the mind. Even if one does not engage in full meditation, just letting the mind rest during some repetitive activity (not worrying if things “pop in” but not going with them either) improves the ability to separate the impulse from the feeling and reduces the uncontrolled “static” that emotional disorders feed off. These are mental techniques for improving the capacity to cope with stress.
It doesn’t happen immediately, it takes practice. But it is amazing what a difference it makes, to dealing with the problem to the quality of life generally.
This did not solve the problem immediately, but at least it pointed me in the right direction. Looking back now, that my ability to cope with certain forms of stress might be flawed, and that problems would manifest themselves in anxiety, makes perfect sense given my upbringing.
If I let my blood sugar get too low, or too high by sugaring up, my body tends to produce anxiety-inducing hormones. My body is less likely to do so if I have been doing a reasonable amount of aerobic exercise. (Tai Chi also seems to help and has the advantage of not being strenuous.) These are physical steps to improve the body’s ability to cope with stress. (Good nutrition, exercise: the normal stuff.)
Nowadays, I can recognise the feeling of the urge to be anxious. More importantly, I can separate the impulse to be anxious from actually being anxious. The main trick to dealing with anxiety disorder is to realise that whatever you are actually worrying about is a complete epiphenomenon. The anxiety is chemically induced. The mind, being a great rationaliser, finds something to cognitively “carry” the anxiety. I am feeling anxious, there must be a reason for that, what is worrying me, oh, it must be … Whatever the […] is, is completely irrelevant to dealing with the problem. If you engage with the […] you are lost in the epiphenomenon, wasting resources that could be used to actually deal with the anxiety. Worse, you will reinforce the anxiety, by creating positive feedback.
Which is where Zen and buddhist psychology can help. It provides the basis for gaining critical distance from one’s mental states. Separating the impulse to be anxious from actual anxiety.
It also provides techniques for quieting the mind. Even if one does not engage in full meditation, just letting the mind rest during some repetitive activity (not worrying if things “pop in” but not going with them either) improves the ability to separate the impulse from the feeling and reduces the uncontrolled “static” that emotional disorders feed off. These are mental techniques for improving the capacity to cope with stress.
It doesn’t happen immediately, it takes practice. But it is amazing what a difference it makes, to dealing with the problem to the quality of life generally.