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 Some signs of overflow can be irritability, sleep disturbance, being withdrawn, or outbursts of strong emotions.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.
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