Does your heart race and your breath get shallow and your skin perspire? Do you get an upset stomach? Will you laugh nervously or have trouble speaking, or maybe you can’t stop speaking because thoughts come all at once? Consider the flip sides of all those coins – does your extra vigilance make you cauƟous and safe? Does your upset stomach remind you to sit down and take a break to think through a decision? Does the barrage of ideas that comes to all at once eventually seƩle into good preparaƟon for those things within and outside of our control? If your answer is yes,someƟmes, or even maybe – anxiety may be your untapped superpower. Anxiety can range from a little bit of worry to full‐on post-traumatic stress disorder. The physical, emotional, and processing changes you may experience in a given moment depend on you and your situation, which can vary in intensity, frequency, and duraƟon. Severe anxiety can be trauma‐based, or not. It becomes a problem when it is felt at an intensity, frequency or duraƟon that has a negative impact in at least one area of funcƟoning.
Now that we’ve established that fear and excitement run fairly parallel, it also makes sense that we can consider anxiety to be the combination of the two. So what’s going on here? Our brains are super‐efficient and run through very similar if not the same ‘pathways’ to process excitement and fear. My nerd hat explanaƟon is that emoƟons are all a part of our limbic system, which includes the parts of the brain that deal with both emoƟon and fear. This includes the amygdala, hippocampus, and hypothalamus. Here’s a rundown on what those cats are up to:
Amygdala: Quick, a threat! A fight! Wake up thehypothalmus!
Hypothalamus: Oh yeah, Imma fight this, or like, get the hell
ouƩa here.
Hippocampus: Wait, I’ve seen this before! We should …
(Also) Hippocampus: Wait, holy balls, I don’t even know what
this is! Let’s …
The hypothalamus also gets your adrenal glands pumping. Depending on the situation, adrenaline may give you a boost high: “OMG that rollercoaster ride was lit—let’s do it
again!” Then there’s cortisol, which may bring your aƩenƟoninto focus, but it is also more likely to knock you on your ass: “I’m so stressed, I can actually feel my ulcer enlarging.” At this point in the struggle, our best efforts seem to do very little to alleviate the worry or stress and it then becomes difficult to NOT focus on the problem. IniƟally, these feelings of anxiety could be our bodies telling us when we need to stay
alert, but those feelings can also hang around asmaladapƟve responses that get us so worked up that our thoughts and visceral responses feel completely out of our control. This brand of anxiety can become arouƟne, familiar and predictable response to a different, but also familiar, trigger situations. RuminaƟon andinacƟon perpetuates the problems instead of solving them. And yet, by focusing on the possibility of what positive and maybe even amazing things could happen while acknowledging the possibility something lousy could happen, we can convince our anxiety to trend toward healthy excitement and away from irraƟonal fear.
Let’s sit with that for a minute. A typical anxiety-inducing example is performing something outside of our typical repertoire. Lots of people have trouble with public speaking – even the inaugural poet who knocked everyone’s socks off a few weeks back. How did she succeed, and how can you? Here’s my word‐barf on it for the moment.
- You’ve got to want it bad. Fit your
challenge into the context of your long‐term
goals. Take one step toward a tangibly beƩer
tomorrow. - Tell your fears to shut up when you’re
taking advantage of a once‐in‐a‐lifeƟme
opportunity. Prepare as best you can, hold
your head up, and make it happen. #yolo - Beware of other peoples’ unwanted input
and anyone in your world who regularly
makes you feel less than others. This is a reflecƟon
of them, not you. - Consider, but don’t wallow in, the worst‐case scenario or “whatever happened last time.” Imagine instead a few more likely
outcomes. - Recognize your triggers. You can’t always tell these ingrained reacƟons to take a hike, so find deliberate ways to miƟgate (e.g.,
bring a close friend along to talk you through) or avoid them (e.g. specific locations or situations). Some triggers will never go away
no matter how hard you work at them, so for
these it’s better to find ways to work around
and with them. - Alter your three variables to make the
impossible, possible. Convince your
hypothalamus to fight, even if it means a smaller
fight, a shorter fight, or just one of several
fights. Tone down the things you can control to
balance out the things you can’t.
Short‐term anxiety can be your Ɵcket to a
posiƟve outcome on the other side of the ‘scary
thing’. Meanwhile, fear gives us a natural
bumper to help us plan for those less than
awesome possible outcomes. I learned to
snowboard in my late 30s and found myself
taking some good advice from the young
people around me. “If you want to progress,
you’ve got to plan how you’re going down the
mountain, move through the anxiety, and Yolo
it.”
Good chat! One of many we’ll have on this huge topic. Until then, I’ll see you out there on the
slopes.
