The Wisdom of Anxiety

by Sheryl Paul

  Exercise

  When it comes to anxiety, exercise is both prophylactic and prescriptive: when we exercise regularly, we create a less inviting environment in our physical body for anxiety to take hold; and when anxiety is stirring, exercise reduces its intensity. Exercise is literally medicine in that it releases endorphins as well as the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, both of which improve mental clarity, the ability to handle stress, self-esteem, and sleep. The Anxiety and Depression Association of America says that “a brisk walk or other simple activity can deliver several hours of relief, similar to taking an aspirin for a headache.” And a study from the Harvard Medical School Special Health Report showed that exercise can be as effective as antidepressant medication, and its effects last longer.

  Human bodies are designed to move throughout the day, yet we’ve become an increasingly sedentary and lazy culture. For most of human history, in fact, people have moved their bodies as part of their daily lives. Like wild animals, people exercising wasn’t something separate from the rhythm of life any more than eating. In other words, people didn’t intentionally exercise so much as the way they lived their lives — hunting, cooking, washing, walking down to the water — kept their bodies fit and healthy. Because modern work is largely sedentary, we now have to make a point of moving our bodies on a daily basis. What we’ve gained in modern conveniences we’ve lost in terms of an effortless relationship to physical health. If you live a highly sedentary life, one of anxiety’s messages is to get up and move.

  Many people struggle to find a form of exercise that they can commit to consistently. They also become overwhelmed by the belief that exercise has to come in a certain package or look a certain way. We need to move our bodies, but that doesn’t mean we need to join the gym and suffer through an aerobics class five times a week (unless that’s your thing). In fact, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, “Psychologists studying how exercise relieves anxiety and depression suggest that a 10-minute walk may be just as good as a 45-minute workout.”

  Without a doubt, most of us have to make an effort if we’re going to move our bodies regularly. But you’re not going to exercise if you don’t enjoy it. If exercise feels only like drudgery, it’s going to fall to the bottom of your list of priorities, and resistance will win every time the subject arises. To circumvent resistance, it’s important to start small with activities that you truly enjoy. Usually this includes something that has a secondary gain, like walking while talking to a friend or gardening while enjoying the peacefulness of being outside. If you’re not already doing so, try to find a way to exercise that feels nourishing and enjoyable for you.

  Sleep

  When it comes to anxiety, sleep is a tricky topic to discuss. While you know that getting enough sleep is healthy on many levels and can reduce anxiety, if sleep is already a source of anxiety for you because you struggle with insomnia, then hearing about how essential it is will only create more anxiety. And since anxiety and insomnia go hand in hand — sixty million people are diagnosed with sleep disorders each year in this country — it’s quite likely that if you’re reading this book, you’ve suffered or are currently suffering from insomnia.

  What I will say is this: if you’re not getting enough sleep and it’s because of choices that you’re making — staying up too late playing video games or watching YouTube videos — consider making a change in those areas. Just like a loving parent makes sure that their child develops healthy sleep habits and encourages them to go to bed at a reasonable hour, so one of the jobs of our inner parent is to say, “I know you want to watch one more episode, but it’s time to go to bed.” If you’re hooked on a show, for example, it can take a concerted effort to extricate yourself from the magnetic pull of the screen. If you can remind yourself that it’s not worth it because being tired the next day will amplify your anxiety, you’ll have a better chance at making the loving choice.

  However, if you’re not getting enough sleep because you try to go to bed on time, but you suffer from insomnia, keep reading. Insomnia has many causes, all of which are messengers about one or several areas of self — body, heart, mind, or soul — that need attention. Insomnia might be telling you that you need more exercise or that you need to learn how to regulate your blood sugar. It might be telling you that you’re not spending enough quiet time nourishing your soul during the day, so it wakes you up so you can absorb the stillness of night. Insomnia is one of anxiety’s most powerful emissaries since it’s easy to avoid anxiety’s call during the busyness and noisiness of daytime life, but it’s a lot harder to ignore it in the silence and dark of night. The more you address your anxiety from the root and listen to the messages that are knocking on the door of your psyche at 3:00 a.m., the more health you will find with sleep.

  Hormones

  There is wisdom in hormones just as there is in anxiety, for they are messengers alerting you not only to physical imbalances, but also to areas in the realms of your emotions and soul that need attention. We live with a rampant cultural brainwashing that seeks to denigrate women and invalidate their experience during times of the month and their lives when hormones are particularly loud, most often around their period and during menopause. We have even named the week before a woman’s period as a syndrome and colloquially refer to it as PMS. Any emotions or needs a woman expresses during times of heightened hormones are often invalidated, both by herself and others around her, with the dismissive statement of “It’s just hormones.” There is the corresponding belief that hormones make women crazy and irrational. The truth is that these are times when women are stripped of certain hormones that normally create a buffer, so we’re given an opportunity to see more clearly mindsets and patterns of behavior that aren’t serving us. We aren’t irrational or crazy; we’re simply seeing what has been veiled over the rest of the month or in the decades leading up to menopause. The challenge is to learn to speak our needs clearly and kindly, but the content of what we’re seeing shouldn’t be invalidated by the sweeping statement of “It’s just hormones.”

  By the way, if that last paragraph triggered anxiety because your fear-based thoughts are more intense during these times and you’re wondering now if you’re supposed to heed them as truth, call on your loving inner parent to remind you that the anxiety stories aren’t your truth but distress flares pointing to places inside that are off-kilter and need attention. If you take the thoughts at face value, you’ll fall down the rabbit hole of anxiety, but if you see them as louder messengers during these hormonal seasons of your life, you will begin to hear the deeper messages. (More on working with these thoughts in the next chapter.)

  There’s no question that a hormonal imbalance can wreak havoc on well-being; hormones can cause anxiety, and anxiety in turn can exacerbate hormones. In other words, sometimes anxiety’s message is that there’s a hormonal imbalance that needs attention, while other times, when you can attend to other aspects of your four realms of self, your hormones rebalance. If you’re seeking to balance your hormones, I encourage you to be careful about how you address them. The medical culture seeks to eradicate the uncomfortable symptoms known as premenstrual syndrome, or PMS, by prescribing medication, usually the birth control pill. What is not addressed is that not only will the pill fail to address the root causes of the hormonal imbalance, but the medication itself can also cause immense anxiety. If the onset or increase of your anxiety correlated to starting the pill, as it has for many of my clients, I encourage you to consider other methods for addressing your hormonal imbalance. The most effective way is working with a skilled naturopath. If that’s not feasible for you, there are many books on alternative healing that can help you achieve more balance.

  As with anxiety, when you shift from trying to get rid of the discomfort of hormones to learning to meet it, you will begin to decipher the messages. One of the most common messages that arises during these times of shifting hormones is the need to withdraw from the hubbub of life and tur
n inward where you can hear yourself and be with yourself. If you’re a man reading this, keep in mind that men experience hormonal shifts as well. People toss around funny phrases like “He-MS” and “manopause,” but there is truth in these jokes. There is no doubt that there are times in men’s lives when physiological changes invite emotional and psychological shifts. For both men and women, when we don’t listen to the messages embedded in hormonal changes, anxiety increases. But when we shift our mindset and see hormonal communications as another messenger from the body, inviting us toward consciousness, we begin to hear the messages, and anxiety quiets down.

  PRACTICEA THIRTY-DAY CHALLENGE

  If you haven’t reduced or eliminated sugar, caffeine, or alcohol from your diet, begin to notice any relationship between these stimulants and your anxiety. If you’ve already done that, I encourage you to commit to one change in the physical realm for thirty days that you intuitively sense would help you feel calmer and clearer. This could be eating a healthy, low-sugar, high-protein breakfast every day. It could be making sure that you’re in bed by 10:00 p.m. (without outside distraction). It could be taking a short, brisk walk every day. Commit to a simple and doable change, and actively notice and record any positive effects it has on your anxiety.

  9

  THE REALM OF THOUGHTS

  The mind is where the soul goes to hide from the heart.

  MICHAEL SINGER

  Moving on through the four realms of self, we shift from body to mind as we learn about how to meet our thoughts, discern the difference between truth and falsehood, correct cognitive distortions, and respond to our thoughts from a place of clarity and wisdom. Growing up, we learn math and reading, history and geography, but nobody teaches us about the logic of the mind and how to navigate the internal geography of our mental landscape. A significant aspect of anxiety arises when we don’t understand how to work with the normal and necessary thoughts that dart and dash through the mind every minute of every day. The most painful and alarming of these thoughts, the ones that can cascade into anxiety and panic and cause untold mental suffering, are what we call intrusive thoughts.

  Intrusive Thoughts and the Cognitive Manifestations of Anxiety

  Just as anxiety can manifest in the body, so it can manifest in the mind in the form of thoughts and obsessions. I’ve never met someone on the anxious spectrum who hasn’t suffered from intrusive thoughts at some point in their life (usually starting in childhood or adolescence). For example, our culture emphasizes the phrase “doubt means don’t.” So when we find ourselves with intrusive thoughts like “Am I with the wrong partner? or “Am I in the wrong career?” we think it must be true. There’s no faster way to send the anxious mind into obsessive, self-hatred overdrive than to confirm that an intrusive thought is categorically true.

  What exactly is an intrusive thought? An intrusive thought is a repetitive, unwanted, and pervasive thought that causes suffering and prevents you from being present for your life.

  We all have thousands of thoughts that enter our minds all day long. But unlike most of them, an intrusive thought sends its talons into consciousness and doesn’t let go. It convinces you that it’s true and causes inner torment. Let’s review the most common intrusive thoughts I come across. Even if your specific thought isn’t listed here, believe me when I tell you that there isn’t an intrusive thought on the planet that would surprise me:

  •What if I’m with the wrong partner?

  •What if I don’t love my partner enough?

  •What if I don’t love my child?

  •What if I’m straight?

  •What if I’m gay?

  •What if I’m in the wrong city?

  •What if there’s a better house for me?

  •What if I’m in the wrong job/career?

  •What if I’ve missed my calling?

  •What if I was sexually molested, and I don’t remember?

  •What if I was unfaithful?

  •What if I don’t have enough friends?

  •What if I hurt someone?

  •What if I hurt a child?

  •What if there’s a terrorist attack?

  •What if the world ends?

  •What if I kill someone?

  •What if the plane crashes?

  •What if my child gets hurt in some way (kidnapped, abused, killed)?

  •What if I have an STD?

  •What if I have a terminal illness?

  •What if I never get pregnant?

  •What if there’s something wrong with my unborn child?

  •What if I do something embarrassing in public?

  •What if I end up homeless and alone?

  •What if I lose all my money?

  •What if I die in my sleep?

  •For young children the most common intrusive thought is: What if my parents die? For early to midteens the most common intrusive thought is: What if I’m gay?

  And don’t let the ego — which wants to tear down any theory that undermines its growth-defying tactics — try to convince you that because your thoughts don’t start with the words “what if” but are presented as statements or facts, they’re not intrusive thoughts but true thoughts. That’s the ego-mind’s oldest trick in the book. Following are some other truths about intrusive thoughts.

  •Suffering from intrusive thoughts is a mental addiction. It’s not a substance addiction (drugs, alcohol, coffee, food) and it’s not a process addiction (porn, gaming, screens, shopping), but it functions in a similar way in that it serves to anesthetize emotional pain and protect you from being fully present.

  •Intrusive thoughts are brilliant defense mechanisms in that they protect you from accessing more vulnerable feelings.

  •Intrusive thoughts often point toward perfection. They whisper in your ear a story that carries as its subtext the belief that if you could attain the perfect partner, job, house, or child, you will be lifted out of the suffering of being human.

  As I mentioned, one of the defining qualities of an intrusive thought is that it appears as truth. For the untrained mind, it can be difficult to distinguish between the thoughts and the truth, and this is often a starting point for anxiety: if you believe that the thoughts are true, you hook into them and get stuck on spin cycle. Shifting from an untrained mind to a trained mind is one of the keys to healing from anxiety. Two of the defining attributes of the trained mind are the ability to decide which thoughts need attention and to discern between truth and hook. In order to do this, you must first develop the skill of noticing then accessing the choice-point: that moment between stimulus (the thought) and response (how you respond to the thought).

  Accessing the Choice-Point

  Some of the most common statements I say to clients and course members about thoughts are:

  •Just because you think it doesn’t mean it’s true.

  •Everyone has dark, weird, unusual, silly, and crazy thoughts, but very few people talk about them. Having dark thoughts doesn’t make you a bad person.

  •A vast canyon lies between thoughts and actions.

  Somewhere along the way, we learned to bow down to every thought and feeling that crosses into consciousness. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that we never learned to cultivate the muscle of discernment that allows us to determine which thoughts are true and which are false. Furthermore, and perhaps even more detrimental, is that because we live in a buttoned-up culture that presents only a happy face, we have no way of knowing that every human has dark thoughts from time to time. In the absence of normalization, shame takes root and sprouts, and we already know that it’s a short step from shame to anxiety. Shame and curiosity are mutually exclusive: when you remove the shame with the awareness that all of your thoughts are normal and common, you will be able to address them more effectively and with more curiosity.

  Once normalized, accessing the choice-point is key; otherwise you become a victim of your thoughts. A thought enters your mind like “I’m in the wrong ci
ty” or “I have cancer,” and you immediately latch onto it as the truth. The next thing you know, you’re spinning into a tizzy of anxiety, caught up in the magnetic energy of the thought you believed to be truth. Or you cringe when your wife comes over to you for a hug and a kiss; you fall prey to the power of the fear/resistance and a story line that assigns meaning to your response, which causes you to constrict and turn away from her ever so subtly.

  This is why developing a strong, wise presence inside of you (inner parent/wise self) that can make choices based on clear intellect and values rather than fleeting thoughts and feelings is essential. Without this strength of inner self, you will be buffeted around by the thoughts and feelings that fluctuate like hormones inside your mind and body. If you’re navigating your life by the compass of thoughts and feelings, you will live on a stormy sea, indeed. It would be like allowing your three-year-old to run your household.

  What are the alternatives? When you have access to the choice-point — the pause between a thought or feeling and believing it or acting on it — you win back all your power. Viktor Frankl is credited with saying, “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” It’s in that small yet decisive moment between thought and action that you can say, “Do I want to latch on to this thought?” If you could slow life down to micromoments, if you could alter time like a movie, turning it into slow motion and elongating the critical moment when your mind veers off like a runaway locomotive and instead redirect it to stay on the smooth track of clear thinking, everything would change. As challenging as it sounds, that’s exactly what you must do if you’re going to rewire the brain to respond to the stimulus in a different way so that you don’t send the anxious mind into overdrive.