A: the four-letter F word.
Anxiety is a hungry beast, but let’s firstly give thanks to our friend, for it is doing its job really well. The beast has got us this far; it is a precious piece of our puzzle that has aided our evolution, that has enabled us to become us. But. It can get too big for its boots.
Anxiety is a fancy swanky word for that four-letter F word, FEAR, and yes, it is often a powerful and uncomfortable feeling in the body, sometimes paralyzingly so. The thought, ‘I feel scared’, if we manage to get that far, comes well after the body has sensed something is afoot. Yes, of course, we have our physiological explanations which can help explain the chemical reaction in the body; the amygdalae doing their job of sensing danger and alerting the body, sending signals to our breath, heart and mind. I don’t need to tell you - you know what it feels like. Trouble is, it isn’t always reliable. Just because something maybe didn’t go well once, doesn’t mean it will happen again or be even worse next time. The body can’t always tell the difference once perception has got in the way. Sometimes it is just remembering, so is reminding us just in case we had forgotten - fat chance!
Anxiety can be a bit like child’s play - that set of stickle bricks that we can build and stack upon stack, just because that’s what they’re capable of - but we know with time, patience and creativity, that we can build something intricate, purposeful, even beautiful rather than just stacking and loading the base.
I don’t like the feeling of anxiety but sometimes I am able to treat it a bit like a hot flush and pause, take a breath and see where it peaks. Interestingly, the chemical reaction in the body of anxiety sometimes feels to me like excitement and I have to discern which is which. If they are similar feelings why is anxiety such a problem? Well, the obvious first point is we might be in real danger and have gone naturally and sensibly into fight or flight - freeze or fawn. However, if we’re not really in danger and there isn’t a lion in the corner of the room salivating ready to eat us, but there feels like an ever-present enemy, then we have an opportunity to do something different with that experience. We can learn to attune and be discerning.
Anxiety is an energy, and if we can lean into it, breathe into it, make a friend of it, have a conversation with it, then we can tune into ourselves much more fruitfully as a way to thrive rather than hide. And I am not saying do everything we’re scared of: no amount of breathing is going to get me to jump out of an aeroplane - unless my life depended on it maybe. But when anxiety gets in the way of our day-to-day living, then that is such a tragedy; when it stops us going for that job we know we’re over qualified for and could do well, that journey we want to make but not alone, that leap we want to take into the unknown but our feet are stuck in treacle - we do have power to do something about these every day anxieties. Sometimes the energy that anxiety creates might be telling us that something really matters. Maybe somewhere deep down, we have a knowing that even if we think we will fail, we can’t shift the desire of wanting to give it a go. But have you noticed how the longer we think about it, sometimes the story gets bigger and scarier? I don’t know why we haven’t all got BAFTAs for the dramas we create in our minds: the beginning (a stirring in the body); the middle (stacking all the stickle bricks - layer upon layer); the ending (known, based on fear or the past). And there is the key: when anxiety stops us thriving, stops us living, we have at best been misguided, and at worst been arrogant, to think we know the outcome every time.
Life is full of uncertainty, precariousness and mystery. Our task is to embrace that, because then we have an opportunity to live to our fullest - and who wouldn’t want that?
Bearing in mind of course that ‘my fullest’ is not the same as ‘your fullest’ and that none of us really know what our fullest is until, it’s over.
Sometimes, we just have to go a little deeper than we’re comfortable with to find out what we’re really capable of. That my friends, is about trust - trusting ourselves - a kind of great faith - that we'll be okay even if things didn't quite turn out as we had planned. And to do that, we must attune; attune to our body, our breath, our thoughts, emotions and then act accordingly with consideration. That is not a quick and easy thing to do alone, so if we need support, we must reach out and get it. We all need support, a hand to hold, a coffee to share: as the Philosopher Judith Butler says, ‘even the pavement supports our legs as we walk on it’.