All about anxiety

Anxiety is an unease about anything with an uncertain outcome. So this means essentially life on life’s terms… as that’s the nature of being alive.

Having a little occasional anxiety is okay. It helps us to focus when there’s a potential hazard ahead.

But anxiety is basically a form of fear. So having a certain amount of anxiety when, for instance, you’re riding a bike in busy traffic is useful in terms of survival.

For an increasing number of people though, anxiety is their daily and seemingly normal state. When it’s like this and stops you living a normal life, it needs to be sorted out.

Many people today are told they have an Anxiety Disorder, a type of mental health illness causing regular and frequently overwhelming anxiety.

It can mean they don’t feel they can go to college, work, the shops, social events, use public transport, get in a car, enjoy their hobbies or even get out of their house.

Even in their house there may well be anxiety, a relentless sense of impending doom. At its most extreme it causes panic attacks.

Anxiety is not for life

I’m living proof. And, thank God, I hardly know any anxiety these days.

That’s a long way from where I used to be. In a mind that tormented me with all the things that I was certain were going to go so catastrophically wrong.

Nobody was put on this earth to be consumed with anxiety. It stops us from being our true selves, being who we can be and as a person who can help others as much as we can.

I’m not saying that someone suffering from anxiety doesn’t help others. I know most do.

Because they think a lot, most are very caring people. But without anxiety stealing time and energy, there’s clearly going to be more time and energy.

Your hands around your own throat

The word “anxious” derives from a Latin word meaning “to choke”. Anyone who has ever had a panic attack will utterly relate to this: you cannot breathe and it’s as if you’re being choked.

Here are some other connected words, from my book Words To Change Your Life: A Recovery Dictionary.

Worry – Old English wyrgan “strangle”, of West Germanic origin. In Middle English the original sense of the verb gave rise to the meaning “seize by the throat and tear”, and later “harass”. This is how it feels to be worried: we are harassing ourselves, tearing at and seizing ourselves by the throat – and the more we worry the more we are strangling ourselves.

Stress – from Middle English stresse meaning “distress”, so a shortening of distress, and partly from Old French estresse meaning “narrowness, oppression”, based on Latin strictus “drawn tight”.

Distress – meaning “extreme anxiety, sorrow, or pain” and is based on Latin distringere that means “stretch apart”, which is how we feel when we are stressed. Sometimes we are so full of stress we feel stretched apart so much that we feel in pieces. Lots of stress is due to us behaving in a manner that’s driven by an uncertainty for the future. 

Doubt – from Latin dubare “to vacillate” and vacillate means to “be indecisive” from Latin vacillat– “swayed”; akin to Latin duo meaning “two”. When we doubt ourselves then we are splitting ourselves in two: it’s the battle between hope and fear, self-love and self-loathing, self-doubt and self-confidence, an exciting life of fulfilment of natural talent or of continually feeling unfulfilled, and the going towards and living in order or the giving in to chaos.

Anger – from Old Norse angr meaning “grief”, also angra meaning “vex” – and vex is from Latin vexare meaning “shake, disturb”. The words angst, anger and anxiety are connected.

Many people will try to cope with anxiety by drinking alcohol or taking other drugs. Anyone doing this most likely already knows, this isn’t the way – it’s not the real solution at all.

It will, certainly in time, make things worse. It can be one certain way to addiction.

You’re under sustained attack…

Anxiety is really a disease because anyone suffering from it excessively has dis-ease. It’s created by the person’s thinking, as a response to how they view the world. 

In a way it feels as if they are under attack. It’s as if there’s an anxiety virus that’s infected them. 

It’s like something from outside has got into them. But it’s not something anyone’s choosing.

It’s frighteningly painful and can be totally debilitating.

Thankfully, as with virtually all states of being that today are called mental health illnesses, there is a solution. There is always a solution.

Much of anxiety comes from how we deal with life on life’s terms, especially stressful things. It’s caused by the way that someone’s thinking, and specifically the thoughts they are choosing to focus on.

If someone focuses on anxious thoughts, their anxiety will grow. The person may then very swiftly become an expert in anxious thinking.

It will grow and grow and it will swing that person around at will, flinging them under the dark shadow of anxiety whenever it wants.

Step One of the Twelve Steps as it was originally written in the 1930s to help alcoholics says: “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol – that our lives had become unmanageable.”

But the word “anxiety” can replace the word “alcohol” here for anyone who’s suffering from anxiety. Because as with any addiction or other spiritual sickness/mental illness (think depression, excessive stress, eating disorders and so on) if the person had power over it, then it wouldn’t be a problem.

Because they are powerless over it, then it makes their life unmanageable.

You are free to choose

So admission is the first thing. But also know that just because you admit something, that doesn’t mean you’ve got to always be in that place.

We have around 70,000 thoughts a day – a figure worked out by the University of Southern California’s Laboratory Of Neuroimaging. That’s about 4,000 thoughts every waking hour.

Our thoughts are a series of choices, but most people don’t know this. So they put their attention on just a few…

They think they are reality. In fact most of our thoughts are a mixture of observations, and then negative and positive thoughts.

It’s just that’s some people have learned how to only take notice of the negative ones.

So as with anything we focus on, they grow bigger and bigger. Our magnifying minds do this.

Consider that someone who’s anxious about going in a shopping centre can sit at home in their kitchen and think themselves to a cold sweat and panic attack from merely thinking about visiting a shopping centre.

This can be so even when the nearest shopping centre is miles away. At the time they are thinking about it, it may even be closed.

This is because our minds are extraordinarily powerful creative organs. As Henry Ford put it: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.”

There is the opposite of the placebo effect: the “nocebo effect”. The word “nocebo” is from Latin, meaning “I shall cause harm” (from nocere meaning “to harm”).

It’s connected to the word “noxious” meaning “physically harmful or destructive to living beings; constituting a harmful influence on mind or behaviour”. 

So we have the ability to think and believe ourselves to not being well.

Think think think

Consider the biblical phrase, and many other similar sentiments from before and after the Bible: “As a man thinketh in his heart, so is he.”

Or in the Bhagavad Gita, the Hindu religious text composed between the 2nd Century BC and the 2nd CenturyAD: “You are what you believe in. You become that which you believe you can become.”

Or Shakespeare’s words in Hamlet: “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Then, know that the word Satan is from Hebrew meaning “adversary, opponent” and the word “Devil” is from Greek diabolos meaning “accuser, slanderer”. Originally the devil wasn’t that red creature with a tail and pitchfork.

That negative self-defeating voice in our head is the adversary, often our worst opponent, the accuser and our slanderer. 

A conversation like this can go on in our head, all of this in ten seconds… “You’re not good enough; that’s bound to go wrong: who do you think you are; you’re rubbish at that: you’re too young; you’re too old; you are crap just like that teacher always said; you really are unloveable (or your parents wouldn’t have criticised you so much would they)…”

These negative thoughts create negative feelings, that create more negative thoughts and negative feelings. Then that leads to negative behaviours.

I believe that sometimes the negative feelings are living within us, they don’t even need a negative thought to form them. It’s toxic stuff that sits in our gut, or our soul if you will.

A lot of recovery is about getting rid of that. Our ancestors knew something about this intricate human condition they had and that we presently have, to my mind much more than most people today.

So we always have a choice with our thoughts. 

What relieves anxiety?

The usual stuff helps: being in nature, yoga, meditation and learning how to relax (maybe, read a book, watch some comedy and/or stroke a pet), regular exercise, eating healthily and writing a gratitude list. Stop smoking, quit or cut down caffeine, alcohol and any “recreational” drugs. 

But the main thing to consider is the way you’re thinking. Having anxiety to an excessive degree is nearly always caused by someone’s response to a perceived or actual problem and not the problem itself.

Most things someone is anxious about will never happen.

It’s an immense help to focus on the positive, on the abundance in life – and not  on negatives and what seems to be lacking.

Keep life in the day or even better the moment, keep connected to people who are for you and positive, don’t spend too long with traditional or social media and the negative crap that it can put into you.

But none of this is something anyone can just instantly snap out of – as anxiety is most often a consequence of what was learned during childhood.

So far, everyone I’ve ever seen who’s struggling with anxiety grew up in a house where the first question to any idea or suggestion or new finding was (or a variant of): “What can possibly go wrong with this?”

So if it’s what someone has always known it will take time to resolve. But it can most definitely be achieved.

It’s wonderful when someone who has spent all their life asking “what can go wrong?” begins instead to ask: “What can go right, how great can this be?”

The future in your hands

They most likely have stopped in its tracks generations of negative fearful thinking that may have gone right back until the time their ancestors were cowering in caves… scared to leave or venture far  because: “What can possibly go wrong with this?”

There will be people centuries from now who will be living much more positive lives, lives that use their perfect talents and fulfil their full potential. These generations in the future might not even know the person who led them this way…

To me this is absolutely monumental. They have shaped the future.

It also means that person who was courageous enough to be honest with themselves and do the work to make the change has lived the life they can live and been who they were meant to be. 

Many people ask me if they can deal with their own anxiety. The answer is no, not until you’ve been shown they way from someone who knows the way. You cannot solve the problem with the problem. That’s like trying to bite your own teeth.

You need loving guidance from someone who’s been there. So if you or anyone you care about has problems with anxiety, I’m here to help.