Anxiety

Time Traveler to the Future and Back

Your mind lives out in the future. The stories you tell yourself begin with the phrase, “What if…?” Your imagination runs wild with projected problems that you might encounter.

Worse, you live in fear that you might feel all those uncomfortable feelings that accompany these scary stories, should these nightmare scenarios come to pass. You constantly battle persistent, intense, and excessive worry.

These “future trips” serve their purpose by taking you out of the present moment. Your crippling anxiety takes its toll physically in the form of rapid breathing, increased heart rate, perspiration, muscle tension, and fatigue.

As your stress increases – work deadlines, tight schedules, family responsibilities, financial concerns – the chances of your anxiety unpredictably escalating to a panic attack weigh on you. These thoughts stress you even more because you don’t want to go through that again. The panic felt like heart failure, and you believed you would die.

Your body lives in the here and now.

Persistent worry is like constantly troubleshooting solutions to problems that exist only in your mind. This approach keeps you out of your body and up in your head.

The longer you can stay inside your body to feel your feelings, the more quickly they will pass.

You stop listening to the mind chatter and start listening to your body sensations. As you drop the critical 24-inch distance from your head to your heart, the world looks and feels different from here.

Being present “in the moment” implies allowing yourself to feel the sensations in your body that accompany anxiety. Usually, we want to bolt from the sheer discomfort of these feelings.

The problem with avoiding feelings is that we never learn to turn the dial down on our anxious thoughts and get stuck. By paying attention, we become allies with our emotions, experience them in the raw, and learn to understand the signals they intend.

Learn to regulate your anxiety.

When anxiety hits, it feels like a dam breaking, flooding you with intense panic and impossible to manage. You want to crawl out of your skin or under the covers.

Learning new skills to regulate the intensity of anxiety is tedious and painstaking, like shoring up the dam with washcloths. With time, patience, and compassionate discipline, you can temper and redirect the raging river of anxiety to a babbling brook.

Anxiety robbed Chris* of opportunities.

You wouldn’t know by looking at him, but Chris* is riddled with anxiety. He is starting U.C. Berkeley in the fall. He applied to numerous prestigious universities but didn’t get into most of them. It is no small feat to be accepted at U.C. Berkeley, so his intellect, endurance, and determination are not the issues.

Top-tier colleges require a 1:1 personal admissions interview. Chris’s anxiety is so paralyzing that the thought of an interview causes him not to follow through with any of them. Although most interviews were on Zoom, Chris could not overcome his anxiety even in the safety of his home.

When Chris imagined himself sitting there answering their questions, he became gripped with the anxious thoughts that he was stupid, dull, or worthless. He feared embarrassment about stumbling over words or saying the wrong thing and worried about rejection even if he said all the right things.

Chris allowed panic to decide his future. He didn’t complete his applications. After being accepted at Berkeley, which did not require direct contact, Chris realizes that his anxiety robbed him of opportunities. He sees how he has played it safe throughout high school to avoid his anxious feelings.

Learning to harness your anxiety is the right choice.

Chris knew his anxiety ran the show, and he was missing out on valuable life experiences. He hated it but had no idea how to handle his anxiety, which came on frequently without warning and blunted his rationality.

In those paralyzing moments, Chris had two unattractive options. In fear, he could continue avoiding the interviews that scared him or implement a new skill to manage and harness his anxieties to propel him through the interview.

Either choice involved having anxious feelings. One was an old familiar pattern; the other was new and frightening. The point isn’t to eliminate feelings but to learn how to cope when intensity swells.

Chris and I worked together to help achieve the following: challenge the stories looping in his mind; lean into his feelings; regulate his anxiety and harness it for good; receive practical skills to cope with the emotions associated with new experiences so that he doesn’t miss out on more opportunities.

Learn to create a different mindset.

Someone (I don’t know who to credit) once said, “Your head is like a bad neighborhood; don’t ever go in there alone.” What does this mean? Our brains are prone to negative storytelling. Compound this with our parenting, the coping strategies we settled on for survival, and the networks we create for our support, and we might realize Albert Einstein was right when he said, “Problems cannot be solved with the same mindset that created them.”

I tell my clients, “Our head is not our friend.” The scary stories and old tapes looping through our minds would rather kill us off completely, but unfortunately, our heads need our bodies for transportation!

Our head cannot exist if it murders us. It may sound morbid, but it rings true. So, we take a trusted friend or therapist into our minds to discern a safe way through our uncomfortable or awkward feelings. Alone, it can be spooky. Together, we can take care of ourselves and keep ourselves safe.

Are you scared of the neighborhood in your mind? Call 530.208.9424 or email lisaolsonmft@gmail.com to set up a buddy today.

*Name illustrates composite of many clients.