Anxiety is your friend

In my teenage years I hit a major problem in my life, It stopped me going out, seeing my friends, it affected me doing my school work and taking exams. 

It had been with me all my life but as I approached fifteen my worry about stuff got to the point where I could not function normally anymore.

I didn't really have a word for what I was suffering with but I now call it Anxiety.

anxiety
/aŋˈzʌɪəti/

noun

1.
a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease about something with an uncertain outcome.
"he felt a surge of anxiety"


2.
strong desire or concern to do something or for something to happen.
"the housekeeper's eager anxiety to please"


What I had is described in definition one, I definitely didn't have definition two, I had no desire to concern myself with anything and my only desire was for the anxiety to stop.


Anxiety is like a dreaded realistion, it has it's roots in a day dream. Thoughts come from nowhere and your inner voice throws horrible scenarios into your imagined future. I call this catastrophising.


There is not only the thought that something bad is going to happen but also the though that you will not be able to cope if that bad thing does happen. In fact this bad thing will be your undoing, things are going to spiral out of control. It will be like stepping into quicksand and you won't be able to get out. In the end this thing will consume you whole. Into oblivion you go!


Last night I watched the brilliant film 'Gravity'. In this film an astronaut gets trapped out in space. The film is terrifying as it really conveys that feeling of spinning out of control into nothingness. The astronaut (brilliantly played by Sandra Bullock) who eventually gets trapped out in space all on her own starts out being trapped with another astronaut played by George Clooney. She is full of fear and this is based in her inexperience, where as George has no fear and seems to know what to do in every situation. But George eventually dies out in space and she is left alone. Alone, in the dark, with no one to help, and without the skills or knowledge to get home. This for me sums up the terror that can arise in catastrophising.


The film does offer a solution and I would love to examine the themes of rebirth and evolution that are so well explored in that film. But I won't so go and check it out.


Instead I want to look at how you can deal with Anxiety. I have never conquered my anxiety fully but I have learned to live with it by making it my friend. and it is your best friend as it is only trying to look after you in the end. Anxiety is there inside you for a reason. I imagine it to be a small frightened child tugging at your leg and telling you about all these terrible things that might happen. And what do you do with a frightened child? Protect them, reassure them, love them.
Your anxiety is the child in you and they are scared. You cannot ignore this child even if they start nagging you at the worst times, when you are trying so hard to be the grown up.
You still cannot ignore this scared little child. This child is you. It's you when you were little, frightened and afraid, all alone, in the dark, with no one to help without the skills or knowledge to to see rationally that it's just a shadow on the wall, or a strange sound the central heating makes.


Yes...anxiety is usually rooted in the irrational. Your catastrophising has lead you make two plus two equal five. And you know this too. But it is not you that is scared. It's the child in you. And that child is trying to warn you, to help you, to look after you. But they have got it wrong.
To beat anxiety you need to put them back to bed and make them realise they are safe and not alone. That there is an adult there that loves them and will protect them from harm. You are that adult. You have the ability and knowledge to look after yourself no matter what. You are no longer a child.


I believe it is this process of growing up that helps to control anxiety.


But before you can do this you need to realise what anxiety is and how it is your friend.


So let's imagine you were creating a human being. You have the body, the arms and legs, eyes and ears etc. You have made this human and you place it in the world. And it just sits there, it does nothing until it dies.
So you place in that human a thing called desire. Now the human wants things; food, comfort, sex, company etc. So now the human starts doing things. And this desire cultivates curiosity. The human begins to imagine ways to maximise the pleasure gained from attaining more and more of what they desire. More food, a better house, more sexual partners and loads of friends that don't ever get on your nerves. But this has a downside. Animals come along and eat the humans. Other humans kills them for their stuff but most strange of all, some humans kill themselves out of a curiosity to work out the biggest mystery of them all....death. Yes...without your fear of death what is there to stop you killing yourself right now?


Death is a real problem for these humans you have made, as you can see these humans keep compelling themselves into an early death.
So you put another thing into the humans to act as a balance to the all the desire and curiosity. You develop a death threat checker. This is a thing that scans the human's enviroment and situation and keeps tabs on anything that might lead to death. It also has a mechanism like an alarm system that will go off when threat is detected and prepare the human to either run away as fast as they can or in the worst case scenario, try and fight off what ever is trying to kill them.


This seems to work well, part of the human is full of curiosity and desires, exploring the world, finding things out, learning etc and balanced by the threat checker which learns also by experience, seeing what tends to kill other people and literally avoids these things like the plague.


But the humans now have another problem, every now and then a terrible unforseen catastrophe comes along (climate change, a strange virus, freak weather incidents) and wipes them all out. So you develop in the humans a really strange attribute....creativity.


These creative types are scattered through the community and come up with mad random ideas based upon mad random problems that rest of the group didn't even know were problems.These creative types scan for unforeseen problems. They come up with strange solutions to problems that the rest didn't see as problems. But, boy, do they come up with some cool stuff!
Instead of just picking the berries why don't we grow them instead? Let's not hunt and eat these animals, let's capture them and breed them, Why don't we try and ride on that horse? And isn't there a way we can put a delicious noodle meal in a pot that we can just add boiling water to?


Creative types ask new questions and try and come up with new solutions. Creative types need problems to exist and actively go out looking for them!


But in these creative humans there was another problem. They kept coming up with threats that weren't there. They spent their whole time worried about mad stuff that none of the others were worried by. Their desire for perfection turned in on itself and they began to criticise and loathe themselves. Any traumatic event, especially in their youth, acted as fuel to this fire. Their inner compulsion to fix everything finally turned itself in on their very being and they started to think they weren't good looking enough, clever enough, or even able to cope with all these threats that they now imagined were there.
They were pretty annoying and got on the rest of the groups nerves but every now and then they came up with amazing stuff like the wheel, or farming, or buildings, or art and music and even eventually Pot Noodles which pleased the group immensely.


So they put up with them.


So you can see everyone has anxiety, it is a very useful thing that checks for threats and stops you getting killed. But in people who have imagination and resourcefulness this mechanism turns into a monster. This ability to catastrophise is useful to the group but a pain in the arse to anyone who suffers with it.


So if this all sounds familiar then I am going to give you two pieces of advice that may help with your anxiety. One is easy, the other not so.


The first is the easy one...be creative!


Anxiety is only a problem when it is not acted upon. When that frightened child is pulling on your leg and you are trying to be grown up and so you tell them to shut up and be quiet, they are going to kick off, full on tantrum. So you need to be sympathetic to them. And you do this acting on their worries. And this does not mean running around panicking.
It means being creative and letting that mechanism have it's outcome in activity. The anxiety wants something to happen, so make something happen that expresses that anxiety. Paint a picture, write a poem. make some music, write a blog, make a sculpture, create a garden, design a thing that does something cool. Whatever floats your boat.
And when the catastrophising self loathing kicks in and tells you that whatever you create will be crap, just say to yourself you are doing this for therapy reasons. It's not for anyone else, it is for you and you alone to get you out of this horrible state.
In the film Gravity, Sandra Bullock saves herself with her own creativity, with her own strange idea that comes from an almost supernatural source.
This is so true of creativity.
You are not really the author of your creativity so don't judge yourself by it.
Let it flow...anxiety > creative thoughts > creation of things in the world.
For more about this please have a look here...


The Anatomy of Creativity


And now for second, the harder bit.


All anxiety, as we have discussed, is basically trying to avoid death. We avoid death by being frightened of it. All anxiety, whether it be worry about what people think of you or being alone etc, has it's fundamental root in the fear of death.
Fear of death is ultimately the fear of the unknowable.


To conquer anxiety you need to conquer your fear of death. Most people I know who suffer with anxiety have an exaggerated fear of death itself (the fear of a horrible death, like spinning helplessly out into deep space) or they fear what is beyond death.


In Gravity, after going through an almost embryonic rebirth, Sandra Bullock accepts she is going to die and it is that moment that she finds the solution to her problems (and this is by accessing the adult, brave part of her own nature)
We all need to accept we will die, we need to accept the unknowable.
In most cases we slip away into a peaceful sleep. I have told myself that death is a natural process and in that process we will have an inbuilt acceptance of our fate. That part of our nature is not apparent at this time because we still need to have a fear of death to keep ourselves alive. But that fear will go when the time comes and we will not enter into death in a scared state. My proof for this is that nobody ever does.
But the fear of the unknowable is really the fear of yourself before you were born. Accept the fact that the fear you have now about this huge unknowable void is a required fear. But that void is unknowable. When we take away all the things in nature that are trying to take us into that void (ie. the threats we spend our time trying to avoid) we are left with everything in nature that sustains us. We feel this when we walk into the sunshine.
The sun gives us life and fills us and our world with the energy to sustain life.
One day it will hurl everything we know into that unknowable void.
But could that not be a part of this beautiful sustenance that surrounds us?
Nothing nature is truly bad. from everything that seems to be destroyed we see the roots of the new. And so it will be with our own death. It may be unknowable but as everything that we see as bad is rooted in our own death, we can see that badness disappears once you accept your own death as part of this beautiful natural process that mysteriously is sustaining us right now.


This is the only thing you should have faith in. Learn to love your inner child and learn to look after them. And learn to see how everything around you is looking after you. We all have our place. Accept your place in the world, move forward and enjoy the ride, whatever that ride might be.


And learn to accept your death like George Clooney....(watch the film)