Thoughts About Anxiety

“I was told that my thoughts are leading to my anxiety, and that changing my thoughts would get rid of my anxiety, but it doesn’t seem to work. What are your thoughts on this?”

 That was one of the questions asked at our recent Let's Talk About Anxiety event at The Hague Natural Health Centre. 

 When I became a mother for the first time I was gripped by intense anxiety. Yes, the anxiety was partly triggered by negative thoughts about the safety of my baby. However, there was something much deeper that my body was feeling yet my mind could not understand. It was much later on when I engaged in therapy that I understood what it was: trauma.

 Your negative thoughts can lead you to experience anxiety, because our brain does not decipher between what is real and what is imagined. However, depending on your unique circumstances, being simply told to change your thoughts to get rid of your anxiety, as the attendee shared, is not helpful. In fact, on top of the anxiety you might feel like a total failure. 

 In addition, we are not always consciously aware of our thoughts, and anxiety can also be a response to not only our cognitive processes, but also to our Body which, as Bessel Van Der Kolk wrote, Keeps The Score. 

 The deeper question to ask is: why do some people have the tendency towards negative thoughts in the first place, or have the tendency to feel things more deeply than others?

 The answer lies in one’s personal history. Your life experiences shape who you are, and have an impact on your thoughts, feelings, and behaviours, as well as your capacity to handle the various types of stresses that life throws at you. 

 Imagine that you carry a container into which you dump the stress you come across from day to day. This container also has a tap from which you can occasionally empty some of that stress. Things that help you relieve the stress, or empty out your container, include exercise, mindful activities, talking to a friend or doing a hobby. If anything interferes with this regulation system of the container, for example an unexpected big life event which fills up your container with a sudden huge amount of stress, or a blockage to the tap due to, say, missing out on regular exercise, then your container will overflow. Some signs of overflow can be irritability, sleep disturbance, being withdrawn, or outbursts of strong emotions. The idea is to be self-aware and closely monitor your container and take action in order to avoid overflow.

Another thing to consider is that the capacity to hold stress differs from person to person. 

 What causes this difference? 

 The answer again lies in our personal history. If you have had a life filled with childhood traumas, losses and upsets, then your container size will be smaller due to the sediments that such life experiences cause, which take up space in your container. These sediments get dislodged when you face life challenges and interfere with the flow. Talking to a professional can help process these life experiences and break the sediments into much smaller pieces that can easily flow out of your container. Also, you may be carrying baggage that does not belong to you which also adds to the sediments in your container. Again, a therapist will help you identify what is yours and return what is not to the rightful owners. This creates space in your container.

 Someone whose life was devoid of drama will have a much bigger container with no sediments and therefore have a bigger capacity to handle stress. 

 So, if you have had a life filled with traumatic events then you become a person who is more likely to have negative thoughts, and is generally more vigilant and defensive. That is because your experience taught you that the environment is not safe, that people are not to be trusted. You have a heightened sensitivity to your environment, and thus a more anxious personality. You are in survival mode. You go through life preparing to fight, flee or freeze, as expressed by one client who said,

“I feel that my head is full, I can’t focus or think clearly. All I want to do is run.” 

Understanding that how she was feeling is normal considering the severe trauma she has been through, already brings a degree of calm. She is not crazy. She is emotionally wounded and has not been given the appropriate first aid treatment.

 The more you address and heal the wounds of your past, the calmer you become and the safer you feel. We underestimate how much past events impact our present. 

 Of course, challenging your negative thoughts and practicing positive thinking is great, provided you have done the deeper work. 

Let's Bust The Myth

Let’s bust the myth.

 Being a coach, counsellor or therapist does not mean:

•  That you have all the answers.

•  That you can fix anything or anyone.

•  That your life is perfect and always together.

•  That you don’t experience bad days.

•  That you never doubt yourself or feel anxious or afraid.

 We are human after all. We are not perfect nor in possession of magical powers. 

 Let me demonstrate this through sharing a personal story. I am living up to the Arabic meaning of my name after all, the female storyteller.

 All the work I did in relation to mental and emotional well-being, provided me with insights into my childhood experiences and how they led me to have certain behavioural patterns as a result of those experiences. This is also often the case with most of us. The circumstances surrounding our childhood shape who we are as adults. The coping behavioural patterns we develop as a result were helpful then as children, however prove to be ineffective strategies when we are adults. One of the things I became aware of are the issues surrounding abandonment, feeling unloved and unaccepted as I am. It drove me to try hard to people please, to adopt a perfectionist attitude and to suppress my authentic emotions. Gaining that self-awareness was transformational on a personal as well as a professional level. 

 I quit working as a pharmacist after many years in the profession and retrained to become a coach and a counsellor. 

 In my existing professional role I do experience periods where I am busy with clients, inspired to write blogs and social media posts, interacting with other professionals in the field, and attending webinars and workshops as a form of continuing learning and education. 

 And there are also the periods when I am less busy, have fewer or no clients, feel uninspired, experience fewer interactions and sit in a kind of stagnation. 

 I noticed that those quieter periods make me feel uncomfortable, and I observed that I seem to fall back onto the old out-dated childhood strategies of trying too hard to be and do what I feel is expected of me, in order to escape this discomfort. This was mostly evident to me during the COVID lockdown years when the world felt like it came to a standstill.

 “How interesting”, I thought to myself, on noticing my discomfort. “I wonder what is happening here?” I questioned myself.

 So I decided to consciously take a different approach during those quiet periods. Instead of getting busy ‘doing’ I chose ‘being’, to instead sit quietly with that discomfort and discover its source. I remembered Dr Susan David’s famous quote, which I love, 

 “Discomfort is the price of admission to a meaningful life.”

- Susan David, psychologist, speaker and author.

 It’s not surprising that I did gain some meaningful information through withstanding this discomfort. I discovered that the source of this discomfort was connected to my past abandonment issues and feeling unloved and unaccepted. The discomfort I experienced in those quiet periods was due to me connecting to my Inner Child’s old fear of being abandoned, forgotten and left behind. 

 That insightful moment was so helpful and healing. It meant that nowadays when I do experience quieter and less productive periods in my profession, I do not feel that uncomfortable anxiety anymore. I let myself be and trust the process. I embrace this time of quiet and enjoy the valuable reflections it brings me that ultimately are so helpful in the work I do with clients. I see them as periods of enrichment. 

 Being coaches, counsellors and therapists simply means that we have the knowledge about psychological models, and having experienced them during our own therapeutic and supervision sessions, we know their value in assisting others, as well as ourselves, to resolve emotional and mental issues. We know how to implement them to support others without judgement and with much empathy and compassion. 

 The solution to ease our suffering lies within us. In the same way I was able to support myself in easing my discomfort I support my clients in finding the answers within them to ease their own discomforts. 

 I am curious what other professionals in this field think? 

 Please share in the comments. 

Let's Talk About Fear And Anxiety

Anxiety was a constant companion throughout my childhood and young adult life. Growing up, I saw it demonstrated clearly by parental figures and society at large. A civil war, a coup d’état and a sudden death in the family only served to perpetuate this anxiety and add trauma to injury. 

Anxiety or fear has a purpose: to signal danger in life threatening situations and alert us to do one of three things: fight, flight or freeze. In our world today we mostly face non-life threatening events that build up and elicit a false fight-flight-freeze response. Since we can’t avoid these modern day stresses, such as paying the bills, giving a presentation, or getting a PCR test result in time for a flight, as they build up we can end up with a nervous system overload. Although this response is in tune with how your brain is programmed to respond, it is out of proportion with the actual danger of the situation. 

Anxiety comes in many different forms: chronic worrying, fears and phobias, performance anxiety, public-speaking anxiety, shyness, panic attacks, fear of stepping outside your home, obsessions and compulsions, post traumatic stress disorder, concerns about your appearance or worries about your health. No matter the type of anxiety or fear you are experiencing, there are elements in common to all anxieties: 

• They all involve negative patterns of thinking. Often when you feel anxious and afraid you are telling yourself that something terrible is about to happen. You conjure a negative scenario in your head, for example about taking a flight, standing in front of an audience or meeting someone new. The fear is as a result of the negative messages and scenarios you are playing in your head. 

• They all lead you to avoid the thing that you fear. Depending on what it is you fear, you go through life avoiding it. You avoid flying for example, or giving a speech, or taking the lift, or meeting new people. 

• They involve suppressing your authentic emotions. Perhaps you grew up in a culture where emotions were kept in. Perhaps the messages you got growing up were that it’s not okay to talk about your feelings. Therefore anxiety is a result of these unprocessed feelings surfacing in response to experiencing certain life changing events such as a new relationship, a breakup, a promotion, a relocation, having children or the death of a loved one. These events can arouse inner unresolved conflicts and trigger feelings of fear and anxiety. 

The symptoms of anxiety are not always obvious. They can manifest themselves in different ways such as talking too much and exhibiting endless energy or talking too little and being withdrawn. They can be mild but chronic, or severe and acute. Some ailments, such as headaches or digestive problems, can also be related to chronic anxiety. 

I went through a big part of my life not addressing my own anxiety and instead suppressing feelings of discomfort. Eventually, through my psychological studies and therapy I gained valuable awareness and understanding of my own anxiety related issues and in turn learnt resourceful ways to manage them.

It’s interesting that many of the clients that seek me as a coach also suffer from and want to relieve their fears and anxieties. My personal experience allows me to fully appreciate their struggle and my professional knowledge allows me to support them to discover helpful ways to alleviate their own anxiety. 

The reality is that life is stressful and certain events can lead us to be anxious and afraid. It’s not about leading a life devoid from anxiety but learning how to manage it so it is proportional to the event being experienced.

Here are four suggestions on how to manage your fears and anxieties:

1.     Anxiety = Fear
And Fear is an acronym for:
F - False
E - Evidence
A - Appearing
R - Real
One of the ways to manage anxiety and fear is to do a reality check. Essentially checking out the evidence. The brain does not distinguish between what is fantasy and what is reality. If you imagine a horror scenario your physiology will soon change in response to that imagined scenario. You will feel stressed, anxious and afraid, as if the scenario is happening in a real sense. In this emotional state you will feel disabled, even paralysed. You cannot access the creative part in your brain that can employ the resources you have at your disposal to find solutions, because in this state you will be blinded to them and will see little or no options. 

So why not use this amazing brain skill to your advantage? If you want to imagine, then imagine positive scenarios and outcomes. Make them as joyful and as vivid as you wish and enjoy the warm, fuzzy, and energised sensations that will flood your body as a consequence. In this positive emotional state you will be more joyful and therefore more resourceful, more empowered and more productive. 

Doing this helps to re-programme your brain to seek out positive scenarios. Remember that practice makes perfect. 

2.     Instead of suppressing your anxiety, try engaging with it instead. Often anxiety is trying to communicate something to us, something that needs our attention. Listen to it and try to understand what it is trying to tell you about your present life situation. Do you need to take action with regards a personal relationship or a work situation? Once the appropriate actions are taken the anxiety often subsides. 

3.     Anxiety typically is in relation to a future event. We can’t control the past or the future. We only can exercise some control over the present moment. A quick way to bring yourself to the present moment is to bring your attention to your breathing. Breathe in and then slowly breathe out. Repeat this for a few minutes and enjoy the effects. Again it is helpful if you incorporate such a meditative technique into your everyday life.

4.     Anxiety often leads us to regress to a past childhood experience where we needed to be comforted and reassured. Here is an exercise that I do that almost always works to calm me down.
Close your eyes and imagine your child self as a baby or toddler perhaps. Imagine this baby coming to you and is anxious and frightened. What do you normally do to comfort a frightened child? Yes, you hold that child close, whisper in their ears and tell them that you will keep them safe. That they are loved and taken care of. Hold your inner child and comfort them for as long as needed. Usually it only takes a minute or two and you will feel calm again. 

It’s important to address your anxiety and seek professional help if necessary, as in some serious cases it can lead to depression and even suicide.

You Are Not Alone

 When I established my coaching practice nearly 10 years ago, I did not expect fear and anxiety to be the most common issues that my clients would present with. I remember my trainer saying, during one of my NLP certification courses, that, often we end up attracting the clients that experience the very issues that we ourselves have dealt with in our lives. As counsellors and coaches we can only take our clients as far as we have taken ourselves. As someone who has experienced fear and anxiety, I am able to understand and relate to my client’s experience. As someone who has gained understanding on how I create this state of mind and learned how to manage it, I am in a better position to support my clients in understanding and managing their own fears and anxieties. Persistence and patience are key here, as behavioural change is a gradual process.

 “The best way to not feel hopeless is to get up and do something. Don’t wait for good things to happen to you. If you go out and make some good things happen, you will fill the world with hope, you will fill yourself with hope.”
― Barack Obama, former president of the United States

 I have come to realise that the issue of fear and anxiety being so common is really not that surprising because it is the underlying cause of many other problems that clients struggle with. At the heart of low self- confidence is essentially fear of failure; at the core of avoiding relationships is fear of rejection, the act of shying from promotions could be linked to fear of presenting and public speaking; underneath social anxiety is fear of being judged; you please others at the cost of discounting yourself because of fear of being abandoned and hypochondria can be related to fear of death. The list of fears that underlies surface issues is endless. 

 Often fear and anxiety hold a person back from living an authentic and fulfilled life. I am reminded of a couple of clients that I worked with in the past. They both lived with and were held back by their respective fears. One suffered from fear of flying and the other from fear of small confined spaces. At some point an opportunity presented itself to each of them that meant getting on a plane and flying to an exotic location. They had the possibility to do something that they strongly desired and dreamed of but the fear formed a big obstacle in their way. However, their desire to live out the dream finally motivated them and gave them enough leverage to work on their fears and make a change. These were stories with happy endings.

 “Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
— Marie Curie, physicist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity

 Fear and anxiety can sometimes be so strong and paralysing that the person experiencing them can end up feeling confused and unable to perform simple tasks. One client I am supporting right now during these difficult times told me that they no longer recognise themselves, and so instead of reaching out to others for help, they shy away and isolate themselves, because of shame and embarrassment at letting others see who they have become. This isolation can take a person from being fearful and anxious to experiencing full-scale depression and even becoming suicidal. It can also put a great strain on their relationships. In such situations, conversations with a professional may be necessary and even life-saving.

 “Knowing is not enough. We must apply. Willing is not enough. We must do.”
― Bruce Lee, actor, martial artist and philosopher

 How proactive are you when it comes to your relationship with yourself and your relationships with others? Being proactive is now more important than ever before. Take action and check regularly on family members, friends or neighbours and ask how they are feeling. Do the same for yourself and monitor your thoughts and feelings frequently. Listen to yourself and others with compassion rather than judgment. If you deem it necessary then do reach out to a professional or advise others to take that necessary step. It might seem like a small and insignificant action to you, but it could mean the world to someone who is feeling alone and hopeless. Connection now is more important than ever and it can save lives.

 According to Bessel Van Der Kolk, a world-leading expert on traumatic stress and author of The Body Keeps The Score, being able to feel safe with other people is the single most important factor for maintaining mental health.  He also said that numerous studies of disaster response around the globe have shown that social support is the most powerful protection against becoming overwhelmed by stress and trauma. We are unable now to be there for each other physically, however we can still provide a lot of social support from a distance.

 “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” – Anne Frank, a diarist and a victim of the Holocaust

My 5 Steps For Managing Fear and Anxiety

Are you feeling anxious and afraid? I expect in this time of a COVID-19 pandemic many of us are.

 I know what anxiety and fear feels like. I witnessed that feeling and behaviour modelled in my dad on a regular basis while growing up. In fact many members of my extended family know what it feels like to be anxious and afraid. It’s not surprising as the experience of years of civil war in Lebanon in the 70’s and 80’s and a coup d’état in Ghana in 1979 only served to feed those feelings of fear and anxiety in us.  As always my curiosity about human behaviours led me to explore these feelings of fear and anxiety and in the process gain some valuable knowledge in addition to that from my own personal experience.  The result has not necessarily been an anxiety and fear free life, but a life where I am able to understand and manage my anxiety in order to lead a balanced, insightful and meaningful life. This experience and knowledge has also proven useful when working with clients who presented with similar symptoms.

 “Surrender to what is. Let go of what was. Have faith in what will be.”– Sonia Ricotte, author and motivational speaker.

 Here are my steps on how to manage feelings of anxiety and fear. The acronym COVID makes them easy to remember. 

 The first step: Compassion, which starts with acceptance. It is perfectly okay to feel anxious and afraid, especially now when we are living in times of high uncertainty and unpredictability. Start by being kind and compassionate to yourself.  Feelings of fear and anxiety as you may already know exist for a reason - to protect us from imminent danger. Symptoms of anxiety and fear were once smart ways with which we survived difficult childhood circumstances. So instead of always viewing them as a negative let’s try and remember their positives. Let’s accept them and attempt to gain insight and understanding about their root cause and the wealth of information that they carry for us.

 “Anxiety was born in the very same moment as mankind. And since we will never be able to master it, we will have to learn to live with it—just as we have learned to live with storms.”― Paulo Coelho, novelist.

 The second step: Observation, in order to see where in your timeline you are putting your focus and attention. Fear and anxiety are hardly ever about the present moment unless you happen to be chased by a hungry lion. Often when we feel anxious and afraid, those feelings are either rooted in our past due to a traumatic or highly unpleasant experience, or they are in relation to projecting our thoughts into the future about a possible upcoming event.  That is why often when I ask my clients to replicate the anxiety and fear in the present they find that they can’t. Therefore, one way of managing your fear and anxiety is to bring your attention back to the present moment. It is the only moment that you have control over. I invite you to focus on the present moment rather than on the past or future, both of which are now out of reach, and therefore out of your control.

 “Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control It.” ― Kahlil Gibran, writer, poet, philosopher.

 The third step: Victories, from your past, which we refer to as resources: Take time to remind yourself of your strengths, because you have plenty, which you might have forgotten while you were experiencing your episodes of fear and anxiety. The chances are that it is not the first time you have had those feelings of fear and anxiety, so how did you manage them before? What positive qualities about yourself are you forgetting while focusing on your fear and anxiety? Perhaps you are a warm, engaging, funny and energetic individual. What is your family history and what lessons does that history teach you about overcoming challenges? What wisdom and strengths can you uncover from the stories you have been told about your ancestors? Remember that most of our ancestors have been through two world wars, famines, and other pandemics in times when science and technology were much less developed than now. Apart from past resources, you also have some resources from the present in the form of people who love you and support you. Lean on them a little and ask them to stop telling you to stay calm and instead just be with you, hold you and tell you that they are there for you every step of the way. They are your support network.

 “Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever is coming.” – Robert Tew, writer.

 The fourth step: Inspiration, which is available if you are willing to seek it.  I mentioned above how you can be inspired by victories from your past. However, there is so much inspiration to be had in the present. Talk and share with others how you feel. You will discover that you are not alone. Be curious about other people’s experiences. Perhaps they can inspire you with their own stories of how they overcame these sorts of challenges. Listening to podcasts or online talks can be another source of inspiration. The other day, I signed up for an online speaking event by Elizabeth Gilbert, an American author who is best known for her 2006 memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. Her talk was about uncovering our resilience and I found a wealth of inspiration and motivation in the wisdom she shared about how to find ways to adapt in the face of adversity and times of threat and stress. These sources of inspiration can lead you to change your mind-set. This might be the first action that supports you in managing your feelings of fear and anxiety.

 “We acquire the strength we have overcome.” ~Ralph Waldo Emerson, lecturer, philosopher, poet.

 The fifth step: Discovery, achieved by becoming creative in finding new ways to cope and manage your anxiety and fear. This is not a distraction but a recharging of your batteries: whether it is music and dance, writing in a daily journal or blogging, taking up a new hobby like painting, regular exercise that helps in the release of mood enhancing hormones, a walk in nature or laughter-inducing activities like watching an episode of Friends as my daughters used to do in times of stress. Laughter is certainly a strategy that I saw my dad use regularly to manage his feelings of fear and anxiety.  He possessed a wicked sense of humour and was often capable of getting a room full of people roaring with laughter. Incidentally Elizabeth Gilbert shared a creative tip on how to manage our fear that I would like to share with you here. She suggests that you stop fighting with your fear and instead grab a notepad and ask your “fear” to tell you everything that it is frightened of. Let your “fear” speak and you listen to it for a few minutes. Thank it for sharing those things and ask it kindly to step out and invite another voice in, the voice of “wisdom”. Ask the voice of “wisdom” to write an answer to “fear”, with regards those things that were listed previously. You will be amazed how much your wisdom has to say, if you give it a chance to speak.  Your wisdom can then give you the best advice because it will be tailor-made to your specific situation. It doesn’t matter what it is that you decide to do as long as it provides you with some relief and relaxation.  This is the time to start learning how to do things differently.

 “Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.” – Wayne W. Dyer, author, speaker.

 The next time you see the word COVID, instead of thinking of a virus that kills human beings, let it be an acronym that reminds you of steps that you can take to help you manage your feelings of fear and anxiety.