The Wisdom of Anxiety

by Sheryl Paul

  PRACTICEBECOME CURIOUS BY NOTICING AND NAMING

  Begin by taking about fifteen to twenty minutes to write down what anxiety feels like and how it manifests for you. Be curious! Remind yourself that anxiety is not your enemy but your messenger, and begin to inquire what messages it wants to deliver.

  The first step toward breaking free from anxiety is to notice when it appears, and then name how it shows up for you. To encourage the mindset of curiosity, ask yourself questions like: Where do I feel anxiety in my body? What thoughts or themes are connected to my anxiety now and in the past? What is my first memory of anxiety? How was my sensitivity and then my anxiety handled by my caregivers as a young person?

  Every time an anxious thought or feeling arises name it out loud by saying, “Anxiety. That’s an intrusive thought.” If you can, make notes throughout the day when you notice your anxiety. The notes section of your phone works well to this end, but keeping a handwritten journal is even better.

  The second key element in finding healing is to learn to meet your anxiety with compassion. This means replacing the lifelong habit of responding to your difficult feelings and experiences with shame with a kinder response that allows you to be wherever you are. Given that most people received the message growing up that difficult feelings are “bad” and are to be ignored, shamed, or silenced, this isn’t an easy task. We will be exploring more deeply throughout the book how to rewire the habitual shame response — and in many ways the entire paradigm of this book is predicated on shifting from a mindset of rejecting anxiety to one of accepting it — but for now, I would like to teach you one of the simplest practices for learning to meet yourself with kindness: Tonglen.

  PRACTICETONGLEN

  One of the most effective practices for reversing the habit of pushing away unwanted feelings is the Buddhist practice of Tonglen, which was introduced to this country by the American Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön. This on-the-spot practice is very simple. Breathe in what we normally think of as “not wanted” and breathe out what’s wanted or, as Pema Chödrön teaches on her site, “When you do Tonglen on the spot, simply breathe in and breathe out, taking in pain and sending out spaciousness and relief.” What’s so powerful about this practice is that it goes against how we habitually respond to painful feelings, so when we practice it over time, we retrain our minds to accept and even welcome pain and fear (in all their manifestations).

  Next, see if you can connect to the second step of Tonglen: Breathe into the pain of everyone else on the planet who is feeling lonely, sad, disappointed, overwhelmed, and heartbroken at this very moment, and breathe out love and connection. If you think you’re the only one having a hard time with life, think again. In some strange and beautiful way, we’re all in this together, and when you can connect to the invisible web of heart-strands that connect us in pain and in beauty, something opens up inside and anxiety quiets down.

  The third key for healing from anxiety is to carve out time and space every day to slow down into stillness. We cannot decipher the messages of anxiety when we’re moving at light speed, for the soul moves in organic time, not technological time. When we fill every free moment with busyness, work, distractions, perpetual motion, texting, talking, listening to music, scrolling, clicking, and watching, we lose our capacity to hear and connect with our inner selves. In fact, one of the messages that anxiety brings is an alarm bell that says, “Slow down! I can’t hear myself think. I have no time for self-reflection. When I lose touch with my inner world, I don’t know who I am, and I feel anxious.” Our culture is moving faster by the day, and our souls can’t keep up.

  Every practice I teach in this book requires slowing down. You can slow down for a brief pause, where you engage in a mindful moment, like at a stoplight when you choose to breathe deeply and notice your surroundings instead of checking your phone or changing the music. You can slow down for longer periods, like at the beginning and end of each day when you take time to journal, meditate, or simply be in quiet reflection. Part of the work of breaking free from anxiety includes positive action, like committing to the practices that I teach, and some of it includes taking time to slow down into a space of nourishing silence and literally doing nothing, like sitting next to a tree or lying in the grass without your phone in sight. In the space of stillness, the keys of curiosity and compassion constellate as allies to aid you on your journey of healing.

  PRACTICEMEDITATIVE QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU SLOW DOWN

  From a place of curiosity, ask yourself:

  •What happens when I take time to sit under the umbrella of a sacred moment? When, instead of taking a photo of the moment and posting it on Instagram, I listen fully to my solitude and silence until I can hear the raindrops of my soul watering my own soil?

  •What happens if, when I wake up in the morning — when my eyelids slowly, achingly open to meet the morning light — instead of reaching for my phone to scroll and click, I reach for the dream image that is still playing on the edges of consciousness before the image evaporates like bubbles in air?

  •What might happen if, at the day’s end, I pause at an open window long enough to look up into the night sky and receive the wisdom of the moonlight? What secrets might she whisper down on silver threads?

  What happens is that you come face-to-face with yourself in this moment, in present time. In those brief moments of silence and solitude, you meet your pain. Yes, the parts of you that you’ve stuffed away because they were deemed unlovable in early years, but also, if you can dare to imagine, your places of light: the poem that longs to be written, the song that needs to be sung, the sweet tears of grief that are waiting to fall into your cupped hands.

  The fourth key, and one that helps you shift into curiosity and develop more self-compassion, is to set the dial of your inner compass to gratitude. This means being grateful not only for the obvious blessings that abound in your life, but also for the challenges. As Brother David Steindl-Rast shares in his audio series A Grateful Heart: “Coming alive is becoming alert and aware to the thousands and thousands of blessings that we receive — even on a day on which we have to go to the dentist or on a day we are really sick.”

  This is what it means to see the gift in anxiety. It’s through our challenges that we learn and grow the most, which means embedded in every anxious feeling or intrusive thought, hidden inside the nightmare of a panic attack and the grueling path of insomnia, are diamonds that, when properly mined, lead to healing and serenity. It’s difficult to imagine at the outset of your journey, but every single course member and client I’ve worked with who has embraced this path of approaching their anxiety with the keys of curiosity, compassion, and stillness leading the way comes back to say, “I didn’t believe you when you said that I would feel grateful for my anxiety, but I really do. Meeting my anxiety in this way has brought me home to myself in ways I couldn’t begin to imagine when I was in the thick of it.” The same can be true for you.

  I encourage you to take the keys of curiosity, compassion, stillness, and gratitude with you as you read through this book and work with your anxiety. You don’t know what diamonds you’ll find inside your anxiety, what messages are hiding inside your intrusive thoughts, what gifts are embedded in illness. These gems will be different for everyone, as there is no one-size-fits-all formula for healing, but as you do this inner work, you’ll find a level of serenity, empowerment, and clarity that you never knew possible. You’ll discover that you’re okay, that there’s a beauty and symmetry to the world that you never quite understood, and that there’s a purpose for your life. The tight places will loosen. Your breath will deepen. You’ll know, perhaps for the first time in your life, who you really are.

  PRACTICEBELLY BREATHING

  Deep belly breathing is one of the most commonly recommended on-the-spot practices to calm your nervous system and, thus, anxiety. The reason for this is that when you breathe deeply, pushing your belly out all the way like a balloon, your vagus nerve is activated in such
a way that it calms your amygdala, the emotional response center deep within your brain. Even taking five deep breaths — slow inhales that fill your belly and slow exhales that compress it — will calm your nervous system and offer a small reset that will help you move into the next moment with more ease.

  Next time you notice your telltale signs of anxiety, stop for one minute, and follow these simple steps:

  1.Place your hand on your lower belly, below your belly button. (Placing your hand on your body, when done intentionally, is an act of self-love.)

  2.Inhale as deeply as you can, pushing your belly out like it’s a balloon. (If you can’t inhale very deeply, don’t worry. A common anxiety symptom is difficulty taking a deep breath, so when people say “Take a deep breath,” it can activate more anxiety. Just push your belly out as far as you can.)

  3.Hold your breath for one second.

  4.Exhale slowly.

  5.Repeat four more times.

  Belly breathing is one of the on-the-spot practices I mentioned in the introduction that can be done anywhere, at any time. Remember: the more you engage with these practices, the more you’ll rewire your habitual response to anxiety from one of fear and contraction to one of expansion and acceptance. The more you can expand around the symptoms of anxiety, the more you’ll be able to learn from them and continue to move forward on your path of healing.

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  TWO CULTURAL MESSAGES THAT CREATE ANXIETY

  The Myth of Normal and the Expectation of Happiness

  As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has — or ever will have — something inside that is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.

  FRED ROGERS

  At the center of anxiety, intrusive thoughts, and lack of fulfillment lives a common source: lack of self-trust. Self-trust is the crystal compass at the center of being that allows us to navigate through our inner and outer worlds with ease and confidence. It helps us discern loving thoughts from faulty thoughts and attend to our emotional life with compassion. Without self-trust, it’s difficult to make decisions. Whether it’s a major decision like accepting a job, or a minor decision like what to order at a restaurant, people struggling with anxiety often find themselves frozen like a deer in the headlights when it comes time to decide.

  The underlying fear is of making the “wrong” choice: a mistake that they’ll regret, succumbing to the belief that perfection is possible, or that they’re missing out. We’re so deeply conditioned to believe that there’s a right or wrong choice that when it comes time to make even minor decisions in life, we’re scared of messing up. It’s like we believe that there’s a multiple-choice test for every decision, and if we fill in the wrong circle, we’ll fail; or conversely, if we answer “correctly,” the holy grail of eternal happiness will be revealed.

  What we don’t learn is that self-trust and well-being, which are the opposite of anxiety, can only be accessed when we connect to our inner wellsprings of wisdom and wholeness. This wholeness lives inside of you, buried underneath the self-doubt that arose as a result of others telling you what to do, like, feel, and think. If you observe a baby, you’ll quickly see that we are born knowing what we like and don’t like, when we’re hungry, tired, or need connection. We know ourselves quite well at birth, and it’s only as a result of well-meaning parents, teachers, doctors, other adults, and caregivers that our innate self-trust is damaged. Anxiety, when approached through the lens of wisdom, is the guide that will lead the way back to yourself. Let’s examine how our self-trust was damaged before delving into how it’s repaired.

  The Myth of Normal

  It can be argued that the idea of “normal” is at the root of self-doubt, and as such, is one of the most psychologically damaging ideas ever to hit modern culture. For lurking just behind the pervasive and negative running commentary of “What’s wrong with me?” that affects most of my clients is the question, “Why can’t I just be normal?”

  But what is normal? Normal is trying to squeeze yourself into a narrow range of what our society views as acceptable behavior. It’s living life on mute because your loud sounds and bright colors or sensitive ways don’t fit the mold. It’s cutting off the flares of who you really are because they don’t fit into the watered-down definition of a “regular” person. It’s not standing out, making sure you’re neither too smart nor too dumb, neither too social nor too quiet, neither too confident nor too insecure, but living life in the gray places and the safe zones.

  The expectation of normal was likely imprinted onto you in utero as the doctor compared your growth chart to other “typically” growing fetuses. The comparisons continued throughout your nine-month stay in the womb, as your mother faithfully attended her prenatal checkups and received confirmation — either via ultrasound, amniocentesis, or palpations — that you were normal. Perhaps the news wasn’t good, and the reports showed an “abnormality,” in which case waves of anxiety were sent down the telegraph of the umbilical cord with the message of, “Oh, no. Something’s wrong. Baby isn’t growing according to the standard.” The comparisons against normal continued at birth, and then at each well-baby visit, at your annual checkups, and of course, once you started school. Well-meaning parents and teachers were in quiet, unconscious collusion to make sure that you were “normal,” and any deviance was quickly nipped in the bud.

  If you were a “good” girl or boy and had the social and academic skills to fit in, you probably learned the rules very early on and managed to do your own nipping. You siphoned off the “weird” stuff. You snipped at the “un-prettiness.” Lest you were made fun of, you quickly tucked away somewhere deep inside you any unusual behaviors. You achieved normal and continued on through your life until something broke you open, likely when the manifestations of anxiety reached a breaking point, and you began to unpack the real you living in the shadow realm.

  If you didn’t or couldn’t achieve normal, life was probably more painful in your younger years. While the other kids seemed to “get the rules,” you simply couldn’t sit still. How many times did your teacher say to you, with clear exasperation, “Why can’t you just be normal?” You tried to sit still, you tried to snip off the “weird” stuff, but something in your wiring wouldn’t allow you to do it. You plodded through school as best you could, and if you made it to college, you likely found a world that, at last, accepted you as you were, weirdness and all. In some ways, you were one of the lucky ones: because of your inability to conform to the system, your authentic self remained more intact. Nevertheless, the pain that the outcasts typically endure during their younger years leaves scars deep and wide.

  What’s fascinating to understand is that normal is a fairly recent notion. As Jonathan Mooney, who struggled with a variety of learning disorders in his younger years, writes in The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal:

  As I drove, I thought about that word normal. Before leaving on this trip, I had come across a great book called Enforcing Normalcy by Lennard David, who makes a strong argument that the word normalcy did not enter the English language until around 1860. Before then, we had only the concept of the ideal, which no one would ever hope to obtain. In the United States, normal arose within a cultural context as the nation sought to control a growing urban population and Americanize immigrants from around the world. Normalcy, though, is first and foremost an idea that arises from statistics. The normal, norm, or normalcy do not exist in the real world of real people [emphasis mine], despite the fact that we are told that we can modify our behavior and train our bodies and minds to reach it. We are told to chase it — in our culture, in our families, in our lives. But when we chase it — as I did — it disappears. Normalcy is like a horizon that keeps receding as you approach it.

  Chasing the receding horizon of normal results in massive amounts of anxiet
y, for the implicit message is, once again, that you’re not okay as you are. The tragedy is that we spend our early years trying to cram ourselves into the “normal” box only to learn later in life that the people we revere most are those who dared to live outside the box. Then we’re left with the daunting task — in our late twenties at the earliest and most often at midlife — of excavating the buried parts of ourselves and relearning what it means to be fully alive and fully ourselves. Wouldn’t it have been so much easier if we had been encouraged to be ourselves from the beginning, recognizing that human beings come in all shapes, sizes, and variances, and that it’s these exact variances that create the colors that render us fully alive? Wouldn’t it be so much healthier to eradicate the concept of “normal” completely from childhood expectations and allow children to be who they are without apology?

  PRACTICEHOW THE MYTH OF NORMAL HAS AFFECTED YOU

  Take some time to reflect and write about how the expectation of normal has affected your self-concept, your life choices, and your anxiety. When do you first remember being told, either explicitly or covertly, that you were wrong in some way, and as a result, you abdicated an aspect of yourself in an attempt to conform? What do you know about your mother’s pregnancy, your birth, your infancy and toddler years, and your school years that may have contributed to the belief that you were wrong or abnormal in some way? Do you remember being told “You were such a difficult baby” or “You were such a good boy”? These statements, while commonplace, reinforce the belief that there’s one right way to be.