Understanding Anxiety: Focusing on the Things we Can Control
All of us experience anxiety from time to time. It’s a normal part of life. In fact, I often tell my clients “The right thing to feel when something anxiety provoking happens is anxiety!” But we also know that anxiety can become overwhelming and even interfere with our daily lives. It’s important for us to understand that anxiety doesn’t have to rule us – we can take back control instead of letting our minds get stuck in worrying about things that may or may not happen.
What is Anxiety?
There’s lots of different ways to understand anxiety, but one of the ways that I like to describe it is that Anxiety is a part of your body’s way of preparing you to face something that could be a threat. It’s got three main components: anticipate, prepare, and stay alert. When they’re balanced, there’s typically not a problem. Like we said, when there is something that is anxiety provoking (i.e. a genuine threat), you want your body to be ready to face that danger.
It’s when these processes become over active that we start to experience anxiety as a problem.
When you’re playing out all the different scenarios of things that could happen endlessly and can’t focus on what’s in front of you, you’re over-anticipating.
When you’re checking and double-checking and triple-checking that you have everything that you might need (this is me heading to the airport!), you’re over-preparing.
When you’re checking over your shoulder or feelings that you might describe as paranoia, you’re staying overly-alert.
While anxiety is a normal part of human life, it can sometimes ramp up to levels that are counterproductive.
How Do We Deal With Anxiety?
We know that there are several techniques that help with anxiety. Like all emotions, Anxiety is a physiological process – there’s chemicals and signals in your physical brain that interact to create anxiety. This is why medicine can be so effective for long-term anxiety: it interrupts part of the chemical signal.
We can also hack anxiety with some behavioral techniques. Because emotions are physiological, we can give ourselves physiological input that can override anxiety in a lot of cases. One great example of these is breathing. When we engage in deep, deliberate breathing, we’re actively sending physiological signals to our brain which often overrides anxiety.
We can also have mental processes that interrupt anxiety. Personally, when I’m experiencing anxiety, I like to try to tease it apart and figure out what individual components are comprising my anxiety.
For example, imagine you’re a few days out from having a minor surgical procedure on your foot. You may be feeling anxiety related to the procedure but chances are it’s not just about one aspect. You might take some time to think about all the different components of your anxiety.
Maybe you’re concerned about the cost of your procedure. You’re unsure of exactly how much it might cost overall, how much your insurance might cover, and you’ve heard enough stories of surprise medical billing that you don’t know exactly what unpleasant financial surprises might be coming after the surgery is over.
Perhaps the surgeon will make a mistake and instead of a simple procedure it becomes a little more involved. Maybe you’ll be out of work longer than you anticipated.
Then there’s after care. How much pain will I be in? Will they give me meds to deal with that? What if I reinjure it?
All of these ideas (and probably more!) might be running through your head. But notice something. Some of these things we have a way of knowing, some things we have control over, and some things we can do absolutely nothing about.
We can find out the cost - or at least a ball park. We can call the office and double check with insurance and have a really good idea of what our out-of-pocket expense will be. We might never really know it 100% but we can reduce the anxiety around this
We can ask about aftercare and medicines that might help with pain and have a good idea of the plan for recovery.
We can’t really know what the doctor will do or if there’s some unanticipated problem and we don’t have control over what the doctor does. So spinning our wheels about this is just wasted energy. There’s a level of accepting the things we can’t control here. I know that’s easier said than done but if we make the effort to reduce the areas of anxiety in things that we can control or know, it often makes the other components of our anxiety feel less overwhelming too.
At Harris Counseling we’re here to help. We can help you find those areas of anxiety that you can control and help make sure that your emotional energy staying in check: that you’re not overly-anxious about things so you can continue living your life and moving forward.
