Has Anyone Found A Way To Not Feel Anxiety, Rather Than Just Manage Anxiety?

[joeylittle]

Anxiety doesn't respond well to logic, does it? I really think it's all about re-training the body; once your mind has set off alarm bells, your body will always respond in the very unhelpful ways. Of course there are the big responses (panic attacks) but even accelerated heartbeat makes stress rise. I'm trying to be really diligent about going right into a 4x4 breathing technique as soon as anything that has the capacity to make me anxious presents itself.

I'm not always as disciplined about it as I need to be, but for me it's the other component besides cognitive that really makes a difference. When I keep my breathing regulated its just not possible for me to spin off into anxiety-land; there have been times when I've felt like I didn't even begin to get anxious - I assumed I might, and I went for the breathing and then the cognitive adjustments (this is just a thought, thoughts pass, avoid judgements, wise mind, etc) - and actually nothing happened at all! I wish that was every time, but that's what practice is for.

I know I can't always control my mind, but if I get on top of it right away, I can control my body, with practice. And a relaxed body really supports having a relaxed mind.

Hope this helps! Don't beat yourself up - it's not true, first, and second, its counterproductive.

I don't think anyone can learn not to be anxious; I think anyone can learn how to maintain a relaxed, mindful state where things that could be anxiety-causing pass right along the same as things that are neutral.

 

[silkleaves]

Oh @Meadowsweet, you are not alone in feeling that way, I promise you. Even with all I know, when I am stressed out and anxious, I feel like I have a very valid reason for feeling that way. In the moment, I have a hard time even separating what is real and what is just my body reacting to an imagined threat. It's not until afterwards, when I've come down from it, that I can reflect and realize what was really happening. I can't cope or rationalize something when every inch of me has me believing it's all real. It's not til later that I am able to see more clearly..and that can take anywhere from hours to weeks.

The major difference, between now and before I started therapy and learned what is happening in my head and to my body when the stress and anxiety hits, is that I'm now aware...instead of beating myself up and feeling completely stupid, I now use that time to reflect on what set me off to try and be able to see the signs for next time. I still feel like it's stupid, I should know better now right? But I don't allow myself to beat myself up over it anymore, because I know that if it was as easy as "just don't do that" I would well...just not to that. Instead, I try to pay attention to myself to lessen how bad it feels.

And that does help....before I learned anything, I would go months in a pit...now, it has been no more than a few weeks. I hope that if I keep working at it, that I can keep improving this. I am being reasonable with myself, I know that I will never not ever feel this way again, but if I can keep working on trying to improve my coping skills, then maybe it won't be as debilitating, for as long as it lasts. I hope anyway.

 

[Valentino]

Education and exposure are two strategies to help lower anxiety levels.

Education provides knowledge and understanding which helps with orientation and clearing up confusion.

Exposure provides experiential knowledge which can help desensitize or normalize emotions and integrate memories.

We also have the ability to distract/avoid/numb/cover/mask anxiety and other emotions, but those methods typically simply delay or postpone dealing with the emotions.

Anxiety is part of a very human and instinctual re-orienting and learning mechanism. When surprised, overwhelmed, confused, and/or disoriented, instincts kick in, which trigger emotions like anxiety/fear/worry/caution/nervousness, which are trying to focus the attention towards finding orientation, information, exploration, learning from past experiences, etc. and also measuring and assessing current risk/danger levels.

Ignoring anxiety paradoxically often creates more anxiety, because that can increase confusion and lower trust with anxiety and other instinctual warning mechanisms.

For many, a major source of anxiety is fear of feeling emotions or fear of getting caught up by raw emotions. Coping strategies and therapy often end up creating complex mechanisms to add distance (almost like a controlled form of dissociation) from uncomfortable emotions & memories.

With trauma survivors, feeling strong emotions can trigger flashbacks which often include waves of other repressed emotional energy.

Ironically, the flashbacks might actually be a natural instinctual mechanism attempting to integrate past memories & trauma. An opportunity to revisit past memories to re-learn from it (education), and an opportunity to feel past emotional energies (exposure) to integrate, release, and resolve them. But, most people end up fearing being triggered into a flashback, which also paradoxically increases anxiety levels.

Breathing and grounding strategies can be very useful to help regulate emotions when they get too intense or out of control. But in my experience, the biggest insights and breakthroughs have come from conscious exploration into uncomfortable emotions. That gave me experiential lessons on how to better work up close and personal with emotions. Conscious exposure was required for all of my prior intellectual knowledge and understanding to be fully learned and integrated. Otherwise I never could really trust what I believed or knew, because I hadn't really successfully applied it in unexpected real life stressful situations.

 

[The Albatross]

Well stated Valentino :tup:. I concur but couldn't have written it nearly as well.

 

[Meadowsweet]

Education provides knowledge and understanding which helps with orientation and clearing up confusion.
Exposure provides experiential knowledge which can help desensitize or normalize emotions and integrate memories.

In terms of education, I feel like I'm doing ok - that's where I can use my logical self to try to tell my emotional self that there is little to fear. Although I find that I can't tell myslf that there is nothing to fear, it feels like I'm tempting fate, because there always is that possibility that something terrible could happen.

When you say exposure, do you mean like I'm doing, which is feeling the fear and doing it anyway? Or do you mean exposure to situations that are more specifically trauma related?

Ignoring anxiety paradoxically often creates more anxiety, because that can increase confusion and lower trust with anxiety and other instinctual warning mechanisms.

When I use my logic to do whatever it is that I'm frightened of, I don't know if the way that I'm doing it is ignoring the anxiety, as I'm trying not to let the anxiety effect me.

Ironically, the flashbacks might actually be a natural instinctual mechanism attempting to integrate past memories & trauma. An opportunity to revisit past memories to re-learn from it (education), and an opportunity to feel past emotional energies (exposure) to integrate, release, and resolve them. But, most people end up fearing being triggered into a flashback, which also paradoxically increases anxiety levels.

I agree with what you say above, but sometimes the time to do that isn't possible. Sometimes I think i just need some time away from responsibilities to let myself fall apart a bit, and get it all out of me, but I don't have the luxury to be able to do that.

 

[ghotiff]

One quote that helps me is that - you fear not what might happen but instead you fear your ability to handle what might happen.

With this in mind, when I get anxious doing something that feels risky or triggering, I remind myself that if it starts to go bad I can handle it. I often have that plan for what to do pre-prepared.

For a silly example. Last week my husband told me at the last minute I needed to be at a shop before it closed. Due to where I was when he told me there was a big chance I wouldn't make it in time. Throughout the drive my anxiety went up but I calmed it with reminding myself that if they were shut, I will drive straight home, it will be an unpleasant drive but I will get home and I will be okay and once home the anxiety will calm down. Once I had this plan worked out, my anxiety dropped.

Maybe this would help you to. I suppose the key for me is to not deny my anxiety but have a plan for what to do in the case in different events, to get me through.

I suppose my goal for not feeling anxiety in the first place is that over time these plans become automatic and my anxiety drops before it is noticed by me.

 

[Valentino]

In terms of education, I feel like I'm doing ok - that's where I can use my logical self to try to tell my emotional self that there is little to fear. Although I find that I can't tell myslf that there is nothing to fear, it feels like I'm tempting fate, because there always is that possibility that something terrible could happen.

This can create a bit of an adversarial position between logical self vs. emotional self. More effective communication, would include building a bridge between these two parts towards integration and working together. Maybe it might be better for the logical self to make detached extremely neutral observations with brutal raw honesty.

You don't absolutely know that there's nothing to fear. You can't predict the future with absolute certainty. Your logical self can share that you don't see any immediate risk or danger in your current environment, and you will try to honor the emotional self's warnings by putting some extra effort to examine your environment to make sure of the safety level. In addition, the actual physical bodily action, can help slowly re-train and educate your nervous system on how to assess risk and dangers in your current environment, instead of mistaking risks and dangers that might be coming from past memories and emotions.

Also there should be a two-way street between the logical and emotional bodies. Maybe the logical self can spend some time and attention to listen and try to understand what messages might underlie the fear, anxiety and other emotions coming from the emotional self. Sometimes simply feeling and listening to the emotions is enough, other times emotions require some sort of action or non-action.

Exposure and education go hand in hand, listening to the emotional body is exposure in the sense that you're spending time with the emotions, and it also can be educational, because emotions often have information or messages which can help create emotional learning.

And using your logical self to inform your emotional self that it might be over-reacting is education, but at the same time it's exposure when you use your 5 senses and logical assessment of current risk/safety conditions and environment when informing the emotional self.

 

[Meadowsweet]

Thanks Valentino, you seem extremely intelligent, and I have no doubt that what you say is so. I doubt that I understand the processes to get there at this moment though.

 

[Valentino]

Learning to communicate and work with the emotional self is similar to training or building up a muscle. It's a process, it often starts out very slow and awkward, but with regular practice and hands on experience, it gets easier, makes more sense, you start to notice changes, and then there's momentum helping the whole process.

Motivation and attitude are foundational for genuine learning, healing, and growth.

Most people lose touch with their inner motivation, then they get stuck looking for external resources and situations to motivate them. Discovering and connecting to motivation/passion from within makes everything much easier. Without it, it's like driving a car on empty, always needing to refill an empty motivation tank from external sources that never seem to be offer enough fuel to get you very far.

Right attitude includes traits like curiosity, openness, attention, focus, honesty and exploration. These are a lot easier to develop with self-motivation.

Unfortunately many people without self-motivation are simply motivated by their unconscious fears. Motivated to do something only when the pain hurts too much. This often ends up being a very impractical and counter-productive strategy. Because under the stress of intense pain it is very easy to make mistakes by rushed and impulsive decisions.

It ends up being a 'catch-22 situation'. It's much better and effective to train and practice when stress levels are tolerable. But there's little motivation to do anything because it doesn't hurt enough. And when there is enough motivation to do something, the action taken is often counter-productive because the extreme stress takes your intellect unconscious and makes your actions over-reactive.

“He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.” - Friedrich Nietzsche
“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” - Mike Tyson

Dr. David Burns, one of the pioneers to popularize Cognitive Behavior Therapy, is predicting that psychological therapy is evolving from a cognitive revolution into a motivation revolution. He noticed that motivation was often totally unaddressed in therapy relationships and theories, overlooking a lot of unconscious resistance from within the patient.

 

[Meadowsweet]

I'm not sure where you got the motivation idea from. It's a bit of a cheeky conclusion to jump to. I spend all my spare time trying to work things out. When I said that I doubt that I understand the processes of your previous post, I meant that I doubted that I understand the processes that you were speaking about.

With the greatest respect, at the moment I can't take in the academic tone of how you speak. That's not a criticism, it's just the way it is. In order to understand the processes, right now I benefit more from the step by step, bullet point approach because I can understand that in a useable way.

 

[Hashi]

I see mindfulness as the key to getting beyond unjustified and unhelpful anxiety. Part of which, for me, is a sensory (not logical) awareness that there's another reality that I'm working to reach. The way I see it, as much as possible I need to help my mind and body experience non-anxiety, or at least lesser anxiety, in order for my brain to learn to work differently.

I have a diagnosis of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and bringing mindfulness to that anxiety has helped in several ways. It works in the same way for generalised anxiety too, for me.

I find that unfounded anxiety isn't cognitive, it's visceral. Mindfulness lets me experience how one moment I feel a door is locked, and the next moment I can't. It's not that I think the door is unlocked. Really, my thinking mind knows that it's locked. It's an absence of being able to feel that it is. I can't register it. So there's doubt and fear that I can't satisfy. The same with other types of fearful thoughts. Whatever I tell myself to think, I still feel that things won't be OK.

So it can help me a little to bring logic to this, and talk myself through it. - but only a bit, only in the sense of managing it. What helps me much more is to try to connect to knowing (in my feelings) that the door, or whatever, is OK. To work on connecting to that other awareness, which I do in various ways, rather than trying to talk myself out of fear.

From practising mindfulness for some time, I've learnt to be aware of the anxiety thoughts much earlier. I'm now often aware of them when they're just starting to form, and that's the best time to stop them. I feel something stirring in my mind, starting to solidify and take shape, and I know that shape is going to be a fearful thought. It's taken a lot of discipline, but often now I can say to myself, "no thoughts!" and quickly move my mind to something else. I might move my body somewhere else too.

"No thoughts" doesn't really make sense, because of course I'm moving to different thoughts. But it's a kind of shorthand for "I'm not going to allow anxiety thoughts to form" - which would be too long (and too logic-based) to be more than conscious management. Keeping it to an immediate "no thoughts!", it's like a gust of wind that blows the anxious thought away before I have time to think. It's now like a learned response, and I'm hoping that it will become more and more a subconscious one, so I won't even be aware if anxiety tries to rise and my mind deals with it before it hits.

 

[The Albatross]

"Cheeky" or not, what Valentino shared has been my direct personal experience.

@Valentino - your posts are a very succinct description, better than I could have done. Mind if I kidnap them and drop them into my own diary?

RE: "Education and exposure are two strategies to help lower anxiety levels.

Education provides knowledge and understanding which helps with orientation and clearing up confusion.

Exposure provides experiential knowledge which can help desensitize or normalize emotions and integrate memories"

The third prong of the approach for me, in addition to the two that Valentino discusses was "mutual aid/peer support". It was a triangulation approach that helped me to be open, perhaps learn from and sometimes lean on the experiences of others. By adding the aspect of a peer support network to the mix, I was able to get the progress and maintain through the uncomfortable or highly anxious or difficult times to get through the other side.

Rather than staying in the dysfunction cycle, with consistent application in these three areas, a new cycle emerges... one that is generally more beneficial to over write by new experiences the former behavior.