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Anxiety Explored
What is Anxiety?
I think that I am on relatively safe ground when I claim that anxiety is fear-based. Thos of us that experience anxiety may know something about the particular problems that it creates for us and maybe something about how we do our own particular version(s) of anxiety.
I can suggest a first-pass at defining anxiety: A relatively continuous experience of fear as thoughts, feelings, or mental-drives that have us behave cautiously and sap our personal confidence.
Alternate Forms of Anxiety.
The following list identifies a number of experiences that can be identified as anxiety. The list attempts to demonstrate the breadth of experience that can be identified as anxiety and that impact us as individuals if we experience any of these versions of anxiety during our lifetimes.
Anticipation: eg. low-level feelings, alertness, focus of mind, apprehension, trepidation.
Feelings: e.g. unease, tenseness, body tightness, emptiness, sickness, and so on.
Worrying: Persistent repeating thoughts.
Fears: Specific fears about your life and what might happen.
Phobia: Intense emotional reactions to specific objects, situations, or social events.
Trauma: Something has happened to you and you find that this can continue to influence your thoughts and feelings.
Stress: Your life is full of pressures and this can become overwhelming.
None of the above. General anxiety experienced as a mix of thoughts, preoccupations, and feelings without clear cause that occupy our attention.
Anxiety as a Natural Process.
But where does anxiety come from and why does it happen?
I don’t believe that anxiety is a ‘dysfunction’ and nor are the people who experience anxiety guilty of faulty or wrong thinking, mental weakness, or moral indecision.
I believe that anxiety occurs as a result of natural processes inherent in our thinking that we do not generally understand through our cultural expectations and roots. At its simplest, anxiety is an example of our evolutionary development resulting in a tendency toward caution when we happen to live in a culture that does not actually offer the potential threats to us as individuals as it perhaps once did and that we do not educate ourselves to understand our own mental processes.
Example 1a: The problem with a ‘strong’ mind.
We know that some people can appear to be both ‘strong-minded’ and ‘big-hearted’. Strong-minded means that we appear to have strong views of our own opinions, we think about our own personality, and that we are often able to find solutions to the daily issues and challenges that we all experience. Big-hearted means that we ‘care’ about our lives in an emotional sense; we care deeply and passionately about those around us and about ourselves.
Our strong-mindedness gives us focus and direction.
Our big-heartedness gives us passion.
Focus and direction combined with passion provide the basics for motivation and “getting things done”. It also provides a basis for controlling our own lives and the lives of those around us.
However, we may also experience a strong imperative to “get-it-right”, to “do the right thing”, and to plan to achieve an optimum result from almost everything that we do.
But, planning to get-it-right can go wrong, and our strong caring character (our big-hearted character) can spend energy on trying to predict the problems that will inevitably appear.
Even when everything is going well and our plans are working out, the intuitive prediction within ourselves can be producing feelings of dread, unease, and worrying. This ongoing unease becomes the basis for anxiety. We are attempting to ‘do’ well and to ‘cope’ for good and caring reasons, but our inner experience is of unease and potential dread.Of course, although our unease comes from a natural desire to do well, we don’t like the feelings that we experience and we can become averse to those feelings. In effect we become afraid of our own discomfortable warning-system. We may experience a fear of our own feelings of fear, and anxiety about our own experience of anxiety. The result, if we do not understand what is going on, is to fall into a form of feedback loop where anxiety fuels anxiety that is no longer healthy nor proportionate in relation to our daily life.
The very useful capabilities to think about what our purposes are and how much we care about our own objectives become a potentially growing source of anxiety that we have little to no control over.
We almost certainly will try to limit or avoid our discomfort by ignoring or denying our feelings of discomfort, but this tactic fails. Our non-conscious ‘mind’ does not seem to understand our demand to stop, desist, and just go-away. Our non-conscious mind just does not seem to understand the commands ‘NO’ or ‘STOP’. This is a well-understood concept in hypnotherapy and in other psychological modalities, but it is not well understood in general cultural terms.
Example 1b: Calming a ‘strong’ mind.
If we want to communicate with our own non-conscious or subconscious processes it actually works best to send back a message of acceptance (“I have heard you”) rather than of opposition (“please shut-up!”).
By accepting our ‘anxiety’ as something that is intended to protect us, we can give ourselves a chance of breaking out of feeling fear about our own fears.
We must accept that our ‘feared-mind’ is just doing its best to protect us. It is trying to identify ‘potential’ problems so that we can be prepared to deal with them. Our mind is not trying to trick us, nor undermine our own purposes, it is simply doing its job, as best it can, to protect us.
Our ‘strong’ mind is also strong at perceiving problems and potential threats. This may have worked well in an historical society, where we had fewer laws and more real-life dangers, but so long as we have a culture that does not teach us how to understand and manage our own thinking, we will continue to experience anxiety in its varied forms.
The first ‘trick’ to reducing our anxiety is to positively recognise our inner predictions of doubt, difficulty, and danger, and to accept and ‘hear’ these warnings. By giving positive feedback, and thanks, to these inner predictions we avoid the problem that our subconscious appears to be ‘deaf’ to negative feedback. This is a recognition that is shared within a number of psychological modalities (approaches) that is not widely understood in society-based general knowledge.
Example 2: Low-Level Anxiety
Low-level anxiety can be expressed as dread, unease, or worrying. If it persists over time, it becomes conscious as well as mentally uncomfortable. Because it is uncomfortable, it becomes yet another problem and we want to get rid of it, but of course, by thinking of low-level anxiety as a problem, we add to the anxiety rather than avoid it. We add to the anxiety and anxiety becomes a “disorder”.
The more that we focus on anxiety, the deeper the anxiety may become. This is a form of positive feedback that we do not intend and that we are rarely aware of.
Example 3: The OFF switch
There is no single simple cure for anxiety, no OFF switch.
In Example 1, we argue that anxiety can come from natural processes, implying that there is nothing ‘wrong’ or ‘defective’ about anxiety or people who experience anxiety.
One approach that can be useful is to consciously choose to not worry about intuitions of dread or unease. Acknowledge the feelings or thoughts and mentally say “Thank you for sharing”, and realise that “I don’t need to worry about this”.In terms of the H I Mind Model, to understand or calm our creative Focuses we may be able to consciously give feedback that all is well and no action (behaviour) is required. Recognise our strength, resilience, and preparedness. Our anxious mind is probably very good at dealing with problems as they arise. Our anxious mind is very able to deal with unexpected events as and when they arise, meaning that we do not have to invest energy in advance.
Example 4: Anger
Continued discomfort and worrying can, over time, become overwhelming. Our response can then become an outburst of anger (our emotional attempt to destroy a problem, to MAKE it go away.
The anger will often, or usually, be directed outward. We are more conscious of being angry with them/they/it than with ourselves. It will also often be inappropriate in target and/or strength.
The result is that we, at some level, know that our anger is inappropriate and ineffectual. We become angry with ourselves and this simply increases our own discomfort and hence our experience of anxiety.
Anger is a feedback loop that tends to keep us trapped in our own anxiety.
Example 5: Predicting The Future
In the H I Mind Model, the Aspirational Focus is involved with predictions of potential future opportunities and threats. The Noble Focus also may be involved in identifying cultural benefits and issues.
Increased activity in either Focus could, at times, when exterior situations are well-managed or quiet, produce generalised intuitions of ‘wariness’ as a safety strategy. Wariness could form a continuous drip-feed of anxiety, particularly if coming from hypervigilance.
Example 6: Trauma
Anxiety can appear in many forms and can have many causes.
One cause that has not been considered in my descriptions so far is externally-driven stress.
Stress can range from relatively minor causes through to extreme traumatic events. All can be described as fear-based stress remaining unresolved for extended periods.
PTSD can result from extreme events and less severe stress may generate, for example, periods of wariness, sensitivity, or nervousness.
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