The Anxious Mind
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/woman-in-white-shirt-showing-frustration-3807738/
Anxiety is among the most common mental health conditions, approximately 19.1% of Americans are diagnosed with an anxiety disorder each year. Individuals with anxiety have brains that function a little differently than those without. Your anxious mind is different in the way that it interprets information, the cues that it attends to and the way that it predicts the future. The anxious among us also struggle to refocus their attention away from worry.
We have a lot of research showing that those with anxiety interpret even neutral information in a way that is more negative, discounting past experience and probability. I will give an example from my own lived experience of having tremendous anxiety during air travel. I have had many years of plane flights that made the same noises, had the same processes, and all landed safely. Despite this wealth of evidence that my plane flight is very unlikely to end badly, if the noise of the takeoff/landing gear coming up into the plane causes my stomach to flip every time. Turbulence, a normal part of air travel, leads to catastrophic thoughts that the plane is crashing. I am over-attuned to signs of possible danger and interpret them in the most negative way imaginable, a pattern characteristic of anxiety.
Continuing my air travel example, I notice that my anxiety diminishes over the course of a flight. This is secondary to another important principle, that of avoidance and exposure. Our ability to sustain anxiety and the panicky feelings that accompany it are often time-limited. This is a function of our physiology – fight or flight response was not meant to go on forever in normal circumstances. Exposure to the circumstances that cause our anxiety can lead to decreases in the experience over time if we are able to wait it out (on a plane flight we have no choice). The opposite of exposure is avoidance – never flying again out of fear of a plane crash. In its most extreme form, avoidance can lead people to become totally house-bound or even confined to a single room due to overwhelming terror about what could happen were they to engage with the wider world.
The dynamic of exposure can be harnessed in your favor as a person living with anxiety. Pushing the boundaries of what makes you nervous and then very consciously noticing the benign outcome is empowering and helps to dispel the negative outcome bias that drives a lot of worry.
Lastly, anxiety is an embodied experience with accompanying stomach problems, headaches, high blood pressure and insomnia for many people. While a verbal thinking style supports and maintains anxiety disorders, our bodies are holding the burden of the mind’s habits. Our bodies have an entire system, known as the parasympathetic nervous system, that is designed to support rest and digestion. Comprehensive treatment for anxiety disorders must include movement, dietary changes, and ideally meditation to support parasympathetic nervous system function. Unwinding patterns of worry in body and mind is ultimately about building a habit life, in thought and body, that supports our thriving.