Releasing Anxiety
Today, I woke up with anxiety. It was the kind that grips you so hard you can’t breathe.
I could feel it buzzing in my chest. The buzzing was electric. It was moving so fast I felt disoriented and a bit nauseous.
I remember a time when this feeling scared me. Now, it’s no big deal. I know that the human experience includes all of the emotions and I know what to do when anxiety comes knocking.
In this blog, I describe how I worked through my anxiety – and how you can work through yours.
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Anxiety is your internal warrior
Karen Young, author of a children’s book called Hey Warrior, describes anxiety as your internal warrior. It’s a fierce friend, trying to protect you from something.
Your internal warrior is very well-intentioned, but also a little dramatic. You can count on your warrior to notice even the small threats and warn you in a big way.
When you know this, you can change the way you think about anxiety. You can stop resenting it, and instead thank your warrior for being so protective. Then, you can ask your warrior what she’s concerned about and evaluate how big the treat actually is.
3 steps to calming your warrior
OK, so let’s rewind back to my anxiety episode.
As awful as the anxiety felt, I knew I had to let it in. If you try to ignore your warrior, she only screams louder.
So, here’s what I did.
Step 1: Describe the feeling in your body
The first step to allowing your warrior to be there, is to notice how the emotion feels in your body. All emotion is just a physical feeling in your body, caused by a thought in your mind.
This morning, I watched the buzzing in my chest. It was white in colour and it was vibrating. It almost felt like an electron was playing ping pong under my sternum. The feeling was making it hard for me to sit still. I wanted to fidget with my hands or pace around the room.
Sometimes, just curiously describing your emotion for 5 minutes is enough for your warrior to feel heard and settle. Sometimes it’s not. Either way is OK.
Once you’re in a place of curiously studying your anxiety, you’re also ready to hear what your warrior is trying to tell you.
Step 2: Find the thoughts
Your emotions are always a physical manifestation of something you’re thinking. Often, these thoughts are unconscious, so surfacing them requires journaling.
I promise that you won’t want to do this. You will feel so much resistance to writing about what’s bothering you. But allowing your warrior to speak will calm her down and allow you to make sense of what she’s saying. From there, you can determine how big the threat actually is and what to do about it.
The trick to listening to your warrior is not to filter her at all. Just start writing everything that comes to your mind, no matter how scary or ugly.
Here’s what my warrior was saying this morning:
You didn’t handle that conversation very well.
That was so stupid.
You’re f*cking everything up.
No wonder I was feeling anxious! I had no idea that this was my internal dialogue until I allowed my pen to write. As soon as I got the thoughts on paper, though, I could already feel my anxiety calming. My warrior felt heard.
And here’s the funny part: My warrior was thinking all this because of something I’d said to a friend, which I later thought I should have said differently. My warrior was just worried about me making mistakes.
When I compared my thoughts with what actually happened, I smiled a little. I thought about how my daughter believes I don’t love her when I say she can’t have a popsicle. Our adult brains do the same thing.
Once you’ve taken stock of what your warrior is telling you, it’s always helpful to offer her a new way to think about the situation.
Step 3: Change the thought
You can’t change your past, but you can change how you think about it. In this situation, I could see that my warrior was fretting about something I’d said.
Here’s the thing, though: I do want to speak my truth. I don’t want to hide my light.
So, I decided to think the following about my conversation: “I’d rather speak my truth and allow others to disagree, than allow my fear to keep me silent.”
Ahhh… So much better. It’s OK warrior. I know I could have said that thing a little differently. And next time I will. But I’m living in integrity and that’s beautiful thing.
This subtle shift in my thinking was enough to calm most of my remaining anxiety.
Book a free coffee chat
Could you use a little support to get through this rut, Mama? Let’s have coffee.
During a free, virtual coffee chat, we’ll talk about your unique situation and figure out:
What’s not working
What you want instead
The pathway to get there
From there, we can explore whether Creating Me offers the right tools to help you reach your goal. And if we don’t, I’ll connect you with other resources that might fit better.