Anxiety
There are two main types of anxiety in my experience:
1) Situational anxiety: an impending event which is out of my control: i.e. My upcoming divorce trial
2) Generalized anxiety: a feeling of impending doom but I have no reason or explanation for this
Anxiety is my imagination about a future event gone wild. “Anxiety” about a past event is not anxiety. It is a memory which triggers emotions such as guilt, regret etc. and a fear that this may happen again because the problem is not resolved.
To deal with situational anxiety, I do what I can to prepare for the worst and hope for the best. For my divorce trial I have prepared and documented everything I can conceive of and my lawyer has asked of me. However, there is such a thing as over-preparing. This is when the anxiety keeps bothering me and I am trying to relieve it by performing unnecessary busy-work which can lead to further anxiety, turtles all the way down. Point here is that a lot of things are not in my control so I do what I can to prepare but if the anxiety continues after a reasonable amount of preparation, it becomes generalized anxiety.
For generalized anxiety, I have found a strategy that works for me to a large extent.
I told someone once that I am afraid to drive because I become very anxious and I am afraid I will have a panic attack and pass out and crash. He told me that if I feel like I am going to have a panic attack, go ahead because the last thing I will do is pass out because I am so aroused.
When I am experiencing generalized anxiety, I start telling myself what is going on around and within me. I say things like, “I am driving my car. The sun is shining. My heart is beating quickly but everything is ok. I am not going to have a heart-attack. I am listening to my favorite song. I am driving to (wherever). It is likely that I will arrive safely and on time. My hands are cold. My foot is on the gas pedal….”
I keep describing my situation until the anxiety begins to fade. What I am doing is telling my mind-body that it can relax. My mind-body is in a state of hyper arousal and looking for the source danger. It doesn’t know what is wrong, but it thinks there is definitely something wrong, so it is looking very intently for the source of danger and often finds illogical reasons if any at all. When in hyper arousal, all my senses are elevated. I hear, see, feel, think and everything else more intensely. This is what I experience as “anxiety.” The key to solving this is to become aware of my current symptoms, i.e. rapid and hard pounding heartbeat, shortness of breath, fear for my life, etc. Then, I reassure myself using the self-talk technique described above.
It is all about the cost/benefit analysis. If I must go somewhere and there is a layer of ice on the roads and/or it is storming heavily, I may decide that wherever I intended to go can wait for another time.
There are drug therapies for anxiety that can be useful for short-term relief of situational anxiety such as benzodiazepines or Benadryl. These are NOT for long-term use. They have been linked with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and other related diseases because they work on acetylcholine in the brain. Also, they are addicting in that use of them creates a tolerance at which point the dose must be increased. The more I take it and the longer I take it, the greater the tolerance and turtles all the way down.
We must do the work ourselves to locate the source of anxiety if it is situational, recognize and accept it. If it is generalized anxiety, the solution is the same. If it is to the point of PTSD, a therapy called EMDR (Eye movement desensitization reprogramming) is very useful. It literally helps me rewire my brain away from the emotionally charged memories (neuronal connections) which cause current fears and what I thought was “anxiety.” This is possible because of what we call “plasticity” or the ability to change the way our neurons connect in our brain and work together. We thought for a long time that this was only possible with younger people, like kids. Today, we are aware that even after an event such as severe brain damage or an event which causes PTSD, the brain can use other areas to control the functions which have been impaired due to the damage. People have had entire hemispheres of their brain surgically removed to prevent seizures from spreading through both hemispheres. According to the old school of thought, they should not be able to control the opposite side of their bodies. But they can learn and practice and get on fine with half a brain. AMAZING!
EMDR is very difficult emotionally during the procedure and keeps on working in the background for a few days after the treatment. It is a huge cathartic release and highly beneficial. I went through it for 7, 45 minute sessions to get over the experience of being with my Daddy the two days before he died. It was BAD and there was NOTHING I could do about it. I am still sad about it, but I am no longer crippled by the event. I am now able to remember experiences with my Daddy that I loved. The old memories are still there, but they do not control my everyday behavior. My swiss-cheese heart has increased in size making the holes, less of the whole. I’ve made new neuronal connections around and away from the deeply embedded ones that lead to negative ways of thinking and behaviors.
Neurons that fire together, wire together. The neuronal connections created by repeatedly thinking about the same experiences creates very strong and intricate connections in the brain that become an auto-pilot or default way of thinking. It is more difficult to un-wire than to create new connections, but if the connections are used less and less, they eventually “die off” and no longer fire together. The problem has been resolved.
We do this every time we learn something new. Not only book-smarts. Using our imagination, performing thought experiments, listening to classical music, experiencing art, etc. are beneficial ways of creating new connections that are useful to me.
EFT has also been useful for me in this way. I highly recommend EFT for discovering and accepting difficult emotions and memories.
Once you have gotten to a point of reasonable arousal at any given time, then mediation becomes a useful tool for continuing to learn to control our mind-body. If you are still in hyper arousal, you can try meditation, but it may prove to be too difficult for beginners, but do not give up. I am here to help you with this.
I began practicing meditation while in a constant state of hyper arousal caused by very early childhood traumas and continued traumatic experiences both from the outside world which were out of my control and self-imposed behaviors I used as a way to deal with the traumas. Both led to severe physical and psychological damage. It took my whole life to learn ways of dealing with all of this and I am nowhere near complete in my learning.
Writing and teaching others how to deal with this helps me strengthen my positive qualities and discontinue negative behaviors. We must keep trying new things when what we are doing isn’t working. If you are out of solutions, ask more questions. If you don’t know the questions to ask yourself, ask me and I will guide you.
