Learning to Live with my Anxiety
My friend Graham working through what must have been an anxious moment.
One month after I woke up feeling physically healed from my bike crash in the Whistler Bike Park, I experienced my first panic attack in the middle of the night. It was September 7, 2022.
From that point forward, I have experienced and become aware of various levels of anxiety at various points in time. Interestingly enough, my anxiety intensifies after I experience and heal from physical pain – like after my bike crash in March, Covid-19 and a root canal. It’s like my body is reminding me, loudly, to pay attention to my mental well-being.
What did I do about this new anxiety?
The right side of my brain wanted to learn as much about anxiety as I could. I took courses and read as much as I could about anxiety. The left side of my brain started writing a fictional story about the insiders inside my system, named Amy, Frank, and Harry who are an anxious security team who are responsible for threat assessment and risk management.
What have I learned?
I harkened back to what I learned from reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman about negativity dominance and loss aversion. Our brains are hardwired to watch for threats before we see them for ourselves. This is a good thing since it helps to keep us alive!
Resmaa Menakam, author of My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, explains that these threats or dangers are actually anything our brain doesn’t know or understand:
Remember that dangerous can mean a threat to more than just the well being of our body. It can mean a threat to what we do, say, think, care about, believe in, or yearn for. When it comes to safety, our thinking mind is third in line after our body and our lizard brain.
What’s my takeaway? My anxiety arises from a whole host of things unknown and not understood and there is lots of room to be curious.
The other important lesson came from two different resources. Menakem talked about when we act from our most wounded parts, become violent or cruel, or physically or emotionally run away, we experience what he calls dirty pain and we end up creating more of it for ourselves and others.
In the same vein, Dr. Christine Padesky, in an NICABM course on expert strategies for working with anxiety, talked about the 4 things people do with anxiety that actually maintains their anxiety: avoidance, avoidance, avoidance and engaging in safety behaviours such as distractions, preparing, and checking. I am quite familiar with all of these. Whenever I felt anxiety, I worked hard to distract myself through excessive game playing on my phone, while others might use drugs, alcohol, gambling or some other form of addiction to do the same. I also learned various breathing techniques like diaphragmatic breathing and box breathing.
My takeaway? I don’t want to avoid and distract my anxiety any more and I certainly don’t need more of it!
Where does that leave me? I need to find the happy medium in between my lizard brain’s hardwiring and my desire to avoid and distract my anxiety.
But where is that happy medium in between?
I found the answer, or at least how to find the answer, through mindfulness. The happy place in between is simply to allow the anxiety to be present, without judgment and without fear.
Mindfulness is not new to me. It has been part of my life for over 10 years and I try to incorporate mindfulness into my every day, like mindfully folding clothes or filling the dishwasher. What was new was how to use mindfulness to live with my anxiety. This first landed for me recently through a conversation with my dear friend Kristine, and then again in another online NICABM course led by Dr. Ron Siegel. Such a relief to find this connection!
This is another leg of my well-being journey. It is not a quick fix or something I can guarantee to be completed within a defined timeline. I will take however long it takes to learn how to live with my anxious security team.
Sources:
Kahneman, Daniel. 2011. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. pp.300-302.
Menakem, Resmaa. 2017. My Grandmother’s Hands. Las Vegas, NV: Central Recovery Press. p.6 and p.20.
Photo: Tammy Brimner
Revised December 5, 2023
