In an article on handling anxiety:
Ask yourself why you’re anxious. Is it because you’re excited? How you interpret anxiety could be good or bad. If you’re about to give a speech, for example, anxiety is good. Instead of trying to avoid it, understand it.
I think parts of the article are platitudinous, but this is spot-on.
There is simply too much information thrown at us all day each day. There’s years of evidence that shows our brains are not properly wired to consume, triage, process and respond to all of it. More often than not, they simply jump from consume to react.
They react to notifications. To ads on a web page. To dialog boxes asking for decisions to be made. To visual complexity in software interfaces. And this is just on our computers and phones. We have discussed before how our public spaces, especially in developing countries, are suffused with visual and auditory advertising and messaging.
Is it any surprise, then, that we are in a state of anxiety? Perhaps perpetual low-grade anxiety?
Personally, anxiety causes breathing to become shallower. It causes my shoulders to tense. It causes me to be less aware of when I need water. These lead to migraines. The necessity of getting through the day while in pain leads to more anxiety.
Earlier this year I decided to break the chain by simply being more aware of how I was physically at any given moment – I figured that your physical state is easier to observe objectively than your mental state. In January, I began training myself to breathe deeply and evenly. The next month, I began tracking my water intake – first via an iOS shortcut, then in the Fitbit app. In June, I began observing when my shoulders had begun to tense.
This has reduced how long I stay anxious before I notice it. I’m not anywhere as good as I’d like to be, but I’m getting there.
The article I linked to above goes deeper. When the writer recommends ‘understanding your anxiety’, she says
It’s often not the event that causes anxiety; it’s the story we tell ourselves about it.
And therefore
When this happens, take a long walk or breathe deeply if you have too much anxiety. Meditation is a force that helps you live in the present moment. “When you meditate, you get a better sense of how your body and mind are reacting,” he says. “Deep breathing creates a direct connection between your breath and reducing stress…
I agree. Awareness of one’s physical situation addresses the symptoms of one’s anxiety. I’ve found that reducing anxiety itself requires you to switch your brain from consumption mode to reflection mode.
Meditation, specifically mindful meditation, does this well, but it’s not easy. If you end up silently criticising yourself every time you find your mind has wandered away, it simply causes more anxiety and makes for an unhappy meditation session. But over time, you become less hard on yourself .Choiceless awareness, as the thinker J Krishnamurti termed it, removes anxiety from the equation because you are now looking at how anxiety comes about, as opposed to being ‘in’ the anxiety. As the writer says
You can get a sense of the source of the anxiety, peel back the onion, and find the cause.
If you aren’t comfortable with mediation yet, I have found a short daily period of solitude to be quite helpful too.
(Article via Jitin B)