Your Mind Your Body

“What do you mean, ‘anxiety isn’t an emotion’?” That’s right, I told the client sitting in front of me. Emotions tell us something specific. Anxiety just tells us is that one or more REAL emotions are waiting to be acknowledged, understood, and possibly acted upon. Like the phone or doorbell ringing, there’s a message waiting for you, and it will keep on ringing until you pay attention. 

This is a very different perspective from the way much of our society views anxiety: physical tension, worry, or some combination of the two, and mainly, something unpleasant that we want to get rid of just as quickly as possible. Why won’t it just go away and leave us alone? We distract ourselves by keeping busy; some try to calm their nerves by drinking or using drugs (prescription or not), but the system continues trying to gain the attention of our conscious mind, often escalating to involve other methods of signaling if necessary: insomnia, headaches, digestive problems, sexual dysfunction, and more, often leading to full-blown panic attacks. 

This avoidance strategy is a little bit like covering up the warning lights and gauges on our cars if we don’t like what they tell us, and usually leads to what professionals call an Anxiety Disorder. Perhaps the word should be spelled as Dis-order, since anxiety itself is not pathological, but problems do result from ignoring or avoiding it. This may be what some psychologists mean when they suggest that our society is suffering from an epidemic of “affect phobia”, an unnatural fear of natural emotions. 

All of this is avoidable if we realize that anxiety carries a message, and if we take the time to simply notice it and ask ourselves: “What does this mean? What is my mind trying to tell me?”. The usual result of this approach is awareness of one or more emotions about something that has been troubling us. Past, present, or future, these emotional reactions inform us about what’s important in our lives, and offer the opportunity to take corrective action, even if only internally. The “Focusing” method, developed by Dr. Eugene Gendlin (www.focusing.org) and certain meditative approaches are well suited to this set of skills that we all need. Learning to use the language of emotions, and to distinguish them from thoughts are vital skills in developing emotional literacy. Once we have the tools for managing them, we can see emotions as well as their first signs like anxiety as helpful sources of information, rather than something to be feared and avoided.

Filed under: Resilience, Stress