Overcoming Anxiety For Dummies, 2nd Edtion

by Smith, Laura L.

  Wait for the next time that you feel anxious. Study your anxiety and prepare a report that conveys what anxiety feels like in your body, how it affects your thoughts, and what it does to your actions. Don't judge the anxiety — just observe it. Then, being as objective as possible, answer the following questions in your report:

  Where in my body do I feel tension? In my shoulders, back, jaw, hands, or neck? Study it, and describe how the tension feels.

  Are my hands sweating?

  Is my heart racing? If so, how fast?

  Do I feel tightness in my chest or throat?

  Do I feel dizzy? Study the dizziness and describe it.

  What am I thinking? Am I . . .

  • Making negative predictions about the future?

  • Making a mountain out of a molehill?

  • Turning an unpleasant event into a catastrophe?

  • Upset about something that's outside of my control?

  What is my anxiety telling me to do?

  • To avoid doing something that I want to do?

  • That I need to be perfect?

  • That I have to cover up my anxiety?

  Mel's story that follows provides a good example of how your powers of observation may help you get a handle on your anxious feelings.

  Mel, a 38-year-old hospital administrator, experienced his first panic attack three years ago. Since then, his attacks have increased in frequency and intensity, and he's even started to miss work on days when he feared having to lead staff meetings.

  Now, he works with a therapist to decrease his panic. The therapist notices that Mel's perfectionism drives him to demand instant improvement. He reads everything he's assigned and tries to do every task perfectly. The therapist, realizing that Mel needs to slow down and back up, gives him an assignment to pretend that he's an anthropologist on a mission and to write a report about his anxiety. Mel completes the assignment as follows:

  I started noticing a little shortness of breath. I thought: It's starting again! Then my heart began to race. I noticed it was beating fast and I wondered how long it would last. Then I noticed that my hands were sweating. I felt nauseous. I didn't want to go to work. I could almost hear the anxiety telling me that I would feel much better if I stayed home because if I went to work, I'd have to talk to a room full of upset surgeons. I have to tell them about the new billing procedures. They're not going to like it. They'll probably rip me to shreds. What an interesting image. I've never really been ripped into shreds, but my image is amazing! If I get too anxious, my words will turn into nonsense, and I'll look like a total fool. This is interesting, too. I'm making incredibly negative predictions about the future. It's funny — as I say that, I feel just a tiny bit less anxious.

  Mel discovered that letting go and merely observing his anxiety helped. Rather than attack his anxious feelings and thoughts, he watched and pondered his experience by really trying to emulate the sense of scientific curiosity of anthropologists.

  Tolerating uncertainty

  Anxious people usually detest uncertainty. If only they could control everything around them, they might not worry so much, and that's probably true: If you could control everything, you wouldn't have much cause for worry, would you?

  The rather obvious flaw in this approach lies in the fact that life consists of constant uncertainty and a degree of chaos. In fact, a basic law of physics states that, even in so-called hard sciences, absolute certainty is nonexistent. Accidents and unforeseen events happen.

  For example, you don't know the day and time that your car will break down on the way to work. You can't predict the stock market, although many people try. Bad things happen to good people all the time. Even if you spent every moment of your waking life trying to prevent illness, financial difficulties, and loss of loved ones, you couldn't do it.

  Not only is the task of preventing calamities impossible, you can easily ruin most of your present moments if you try. Think about it. If you check your car's engine before leaving for work each day, if you scrimp and save every possible penny for retirement, if you never eat ice cream because of the fat content, if you overprotect your children because you worry that they'll get into trouble, if you wash your hands every time you touch a doorknob, if you never take a risk, then what will your life be like? Probably not much fun.

  Worry doesn't change what will happen. Some people think that if they worry enough, bad things won't occur. Because bad things don't happen to them on most of those worry days, they feel like their worrying has paid off. But worry by itself has never in the history of humans prevented anything from happening. Not once.

  Find out how to embrace uncertainty, which can make life both interesting and exciting. Discover how to appreciate adversity as well as a little suffering. Without some suffering and adversity, you fail to value the good moments.

  When you find yourself feeling anxious, ask yourself whether your worry is an attempt to control the unpredictable. For example, many people worry about their retirement funds in the stock market. They watch how their stocks are doing every single day. They scan the newspaper for financial information that may possibly help them know when to sell at just the right moment. Yet, as the past few years have shown, there are no guarantees in the stock market.

  Let go of your need to predict and control. Of course, take reasonable precautions regarding your health, family, finances, and well-being, but when worry about the future invades the present enjoyment of your life, it has gone too far. Appreciate uncertainty and live well today.

  Being patient with yourself

  When you think about patience, what comes to mind? Calm, acceptance, and tolerance. When you become anxious, try to be patient and kind with yourself and say to yourself,

  Okay, I'm feeling anxious. That's my experience.

  Like other feelings, anxiety comes and goes.

  Let me be present with my anxiety.

  In the example of Jeanine that follows, Jeanine's contrasting reactions, first with impatience and then with patience, provide an illustration of how you, too, can turn your impatience into patience.

  Jeanine begins to feel anxious during the morning commute. She leaves home at 7:15 a.m. and usually can count on being to work on time at 8 a.m. Frequently, she arrives about five minutes early, but once a month or so, traffic backs up, and she's a few minutes late. This morning appears to be one of those.

  The impatient Jeanine: Traffic is at a standstill, and anxiety churns in Jeanine's stomach and builds. Sweating and clutching the steering wheel, she begins tracking the ways that she can change lanes and get through a bit faster. She hates starting her day out like this. She can't stand the anxiety and tries to get rid of it, but she fails. She visualizes her boss noticing her tardiness and the others at her office looking up at her. Anxiety turns to anger as she criticizes herself for not leaving earlier.

  The patient Jeanine: Traffic is at a standstill, and anxiety churns in Jeanine's stomach. Clutching the steering wheel, she fights the urge to change lanes. She notices and accepts the anxiety in her body, thinking, "I may be late, but most every morning, I am on time or early. My boss and co-workers know that. I can feel my anxiety, but that's my experience. How interesting. I'll arrive a few minutes late this morning, and that's okay."

  In the second scenario, the anxiety dissipates because Jeanine allows herself to feel it without judgment or intolerance. She connects to her present situation with patience.

  Like everything else, making patience a habit takes practice. You build your tolerance for patience over time. Like building muscles by lifting weights, you can build the patience muscles in your mind a little at a time.

  Letting Go of Ego

  Everyone wants to have high self-esteem. Bookstores and libraries display hundreds of books about how to pump up your self-esteem. You may think that having high self-esteem would decrease your anxiety. It seems logical anyway.

  However, self-esteem doesn't work that way. In fact, overly positive sel
f-esteem causes more anxiety, as well as a host of other ills. Similarly, most positive human characteristics and qualities turn into negatives when they reach extreme levels. For example, courage, generosity, diligence, and trust are all wonderful traits. But excessive courage can make a person reckless, excessive generosity can make a person an easy mark for the dishonest, excessive focus on work can leave insufficient room for pleasure, and excessive trust can turn someone into a dupe. Perhaps our upcoming description of self-esteem as similar to a balloon may help you understand the shocking dangers of too much investment in ego and self-esteem.

  Inflating and deflating the self-esteem balloon

  We think of self-esteem like a balloon. Too little self-esteem is like an empty balloon. It has no air; it's flat, deflated, and can't float. Therefore, a deflated balloon isn't especially fun or useful. If your self-esteem is quite low, you probably spend time judging yourself harshly and negatively. Your energy probably suffers, and you may feel quite anxious about your perceived deficiencies.

  Too much ego or self-esteem, however, is like a balloon that's tightly stretched and so full of air that it's about to explode. One tiny scrape, and the balloon bursts. People with too much self-esteem worry constantly about those scrapes. Any threat to their self-esteem causes considerable anxiety and sometimes anger. You can't do much in life without running into at least some threat to your ego. If your self-esteem balloon is too full of itself, those threats can appear especially ominous.

  On the other hand, a balloon with just the right amount of air is pretty tough to break. It can bounce around easily, joyfully, and playfully. The balloon with the right amount of air doesn't worry so much about crashing or bursting.

  In a sense, both the deflated balloon and the one close to the bursting point worry plenty about their own state: their condition, worth, and vulnerability. The key to having just the right amount of ego — air in the balloon — is to have less concern with yourself (along with more concern for others) and less worry about how you stack up against others.

  When you can accept both your positive and negative qualities without being overly concerned for either, you'll have the right amount of air in your ego balloon, but that isn't always so easy to do. It takes a solid focus on learning, striving, and working hard — though not to excess.

  The seductive power of positive thinking

  In the 1950s, self-help gurus began a movement by encouraging everyone to pump up their self-esteem. Before 1950, less than a hundred articles were written on the topic of self-esteem in professional journals; however, in the past ten years alone, more than 8,000 such articles have appeared in social science journals. In addition, literally thousands of self-help books have promoted the unquestioned value of nurturing self-esteem. The self-esteem movement now permeates parenting magazines, school curriculums, and bookshelves. It seduced a generation of parents, teachers, and mental-health workers into believing that the best thing that they could do for kids was to pump up their self-esteem.

  So has more than a half-century of promoting self-esteem (also known as ego) paid off? Hardly. Today, school achievement lags significantly behind where it was in 1960. School grades, however, are up. School violence is much higher than 50 years ago, and the rates of depression and anxiety among today's youth are higher than ever.

  Why? An incredible number of recent research studies show a strong link between the overabundant focus on the self and violence, poor school achievement, and emotional problems of all sorts. Deflated self-esteem also appears to be bad for you, but studies suggest that an overly inflated self-esteem is even worse. The answer appears to lie in having less focus on the almighty self.

  Appreciating your imperfections

  All too often, anxious people feel that they must be perfect in order for others to like and accept them. No wonder they feel anxious. Nobody's perfect, and no one ever will be. Take the case of Kelly.

  Kelly is perhaps as close to perfect as you can find. Kelly always wears exactly the right fashionable clothes, the right colors, and her accessories always match. She takes classes in interior design so her house has just the right look. She exercises four times a week and eats only healthy foods. Her makeup, which she applies with great care, appears flawless. She always knows just what to say, never stumbling over a single word or swearing. She always exhibits kindness and has a positive outlook.

  Would you like to have a beer with Kelly? Does she seem like someone you'd like to hang out at a pool with on a summer weekend? Would you feel easy and natural around Kelly? Frankly, we'd probably pass on the idea of having her as one of our best friends.

  Think about one of your good friends with whom you like to spend time, someone you enjoy and value, and someone you've known for a while. Picture that person in your mind and recall some of the good times that you've spent together. Let yourself enjoy those images. Think about how much you appreciate this person and how your life has been enriched by the relationship.

  Realize that you've always known about your friend's negative qualities and imperfections, yet you've continued to appreciate your friend. Perhaps you even find some of the flaws amusing or interesting. Maybe they give your friend color. Thinking about the flaws isn't likely to change your opinion or feelings, either.

  Try applying the same perspective to yourself. Appreciate your little flaws, foibles, and quirks. They make you interesting and unique. Be a friend to yourself. Notice your gifts and your imperfections. Figure out how to acknowledge it all as one package. Don't disown your flaws.

  Try this exercise we call "Appreciating Flawed Friends." You'll likely notice that you accept your friend, good and bad, positive or negative.

  1. In the notebook or file you have for exercises, make two columns. Think of a good friend.

  2. In the first column, write down a couple of the friend's positive qualities.

  3. In the second column, describe a couple of negative qualities or imperfections that your friend has.

  Following this exercise, realize that your friends probably have a similar picture of you. The following example shows you how this particular exercise works for Curtis.

  Curtis fills in the "Appreciating Flawed Friends" exercise in Table 13-1 while thinking about his buddy Jack. In the respective columns, he writes about Jack's positive qualities and imperfections.

  Curtis accepts Jack, flaws and all. There's no one that Curtis would rather spend time with, and Jack is the first person he would turn to in a crisis. Can Curtis accept himself like he does Jack? That's the task at hand.

  If your friend filled out the same form on you, no doubt she would write about both wonderful qualities and some less-than-wonderful traits. And yet, your friend wouldn't suddenly give up the friendship because of your imperfections. Of course not; nobody's perfect. If we all gave up on our imperfect friends, we would have no friends at all.

  Self-forgiveness is difficult. Perhaps even more difficult is finding out how to drop defensive barriers in response to criticism from others. Figure out how to listen to criticism. Consider the fact that it may at least have an element of truth. Appreciate that portion of truth.

  Try acknowledging any sliver of truth that criticism contains. Perhaps it's true sometimes. Perhaps the criticism is partially applicable. Instead of putting up barriers to communication and problem solving, admitting to some flaws brings people closer.

  Connecting with the Here and Now

  In some ways, language represents the peak of evolutionary development. Language makes us human, gives us art, allows us to express complex ideas, and provides us with the tools for creating solutions to problems. At the same time, language lays the foundation for much of our emotional distress. How can that be?

  You may think that dogs don't get anxious, but they do. However, they only feel anxiety when they're in direct contact with experiences that cause them pain or discomfort. For example, dogs rarely enjoy going to the vet. More than a few dog owners have had to drag their dogs through
the veterinarian's door by pulling on the leash with all their might.

  However, humans do what dogs would never do. Humans wake up dreading the events of the day that lies ahead. Dogs don't wake up at 3 a.m. and think, "Oh no! Is today the day that I have to go to the vet? What will happen to me there?"