Defining Confinement: Anxiety or Excitement?

How important is it to define each emotion? Sometimes I wonder if definitions just give people something to worry about. I imagine no one experiences any one emotion exactly the same way anyway. There are enough similarities among experiences to write textbooks and that sort of thing. But all I know is that there was a definite period in my life when I was practically obsessed with my mental health. But not in a “let’s work through this” kind of way. It was more of an “omg I’m doomed to be a failure because I’m neurodiverse” sort of way. I got through it, but when there are definitions linked to your emotions, we tend to keep them locked in those boxes without realizing there is nothing really shackling them to your identity. We all have choices.

I feel anxious a lot. I feel the physical manifestations of anxiety, and I am not sure where it comes from. My body feels tight, my chest especially. I suddenly realize I’m preoccupied with taking a deep, satisfying breath. Yet we all know those only come once in a while. But when I can’t satisfy the need for that one deep, fantastic breath, I start to panic a little bit. I have to talk myself down from these moments, which is getting easier to do. Today in the car I felt that same tightness and breath obsession, yet I was simultaneously aware of how extraordinarily and joyously excited I felt about life. Is excitement the same as anxiety? Do we just kind of… Idk… assign fear to anxiety and fun to excitement? Excitement is about anticipation. So is anxiety. When we’re excited, we anticipate the future is going to be awesome, yet when we’re anxious, we anticipate the future is going to be scary. We walk into the future with hearts open to greatness… or open to fear.

So I looked it up. Sure enough, my hero, Brene Brown confirms it. She says, “Anxiety and excitement present the same way in the body. For people who label it as anxiety, their experiences ultimately are more negative than those that can label it as excitement…” She goes on to say that the words you use shape your experience. Jason Silva said something similar in an Instagram reel I shared today too, actually. He says, “We are the sum of our experiences. We become what we behold… our choices matter… what we choose, we become. Our creative and linguistic choices govern our fate. I design, therefore I become. The whole notion of why design matters gets to the heart of the matter. For what we design designs us back.”

This is not a new idea, but what’s intellectually considered in the brain hits differently the second it’s consciously embodied. Maybe this is the evolutionary purpose of stress. Stress can propel you forward to achieve the unachievable. It’s adrenaline. It’s drive. It’s pressure. When we put our bodies through that in the name of excitement, our enthusiasm works in our favor. When we put that energy toward fear and worry, we plummet. It’s not just words. It’s a universal function.

Anxiety is real, and nothing in this stream of consciousness comes from a place that’s dismissive of fear and anxiety. It’s just such a comfort to consider how profoundly we are NOT bound by our words and definitions. We are so much more than that.