Typically if we are just anxious about something and our anxiety doesn’t have roots we can talk ourselves out it. If you are a habitually trusting, safe-feeling person, you can interrupt an anxious thought pattern by changing the direction of your thoughts.

This is for those of us whose anxiety has roots.

When habitually feel anxious that feeling can be so pervasive it is hard to see what is happening. Where did it come from? What is it actually about? When you feel anxious, that anxiety can scoop up all subjects so now you are anxious about everything. You can be anxious about something just because you happen to think about them while you were anxious.

It can feel like the whole experience of being alive is being hijacked.

Its like the mind throwing itself underwater. What can you grab onto to help yourself out? And how can you find and heal the root?

The birth of anxiety:

All day the deepest parts of the mind are responding to all of the different stimulation around and in you. Your mind is deciding if the light, the sound, the sensation, the thought, the words, the temperature EVERYTHING is safe or dangerous. Each of these inputs is an opportunity to perceive danger or safety. The mind makes this decision without oversight based on your past (including your genetic past).

If we perceive danger the body responds with millions of chemical reactions we experience sensationally. Maybe we feel hot, we feel our heartbeat quicken, we feel tightness in our stomach or chest. Lots of sensations.

All of this is automatic and pretty much impossible to interrupt. You can’t decide something is safe fast enough to beat the minds automatic decision. And you can’t decide something is safe fast enough to interrupt that decision getting communicated to the body.

This is why it feels like anxiety is completely out of our hands.

What happens next is where you have power.

Once you experience a sensation you can automatically respond to those sensations or you can choose your response to the sensations. How you respond to the sensations then becomes your new past. It is the most up to date version of whether the stimuli that just came in is actually dangerous or safe.

If you automatically respond, you might be looking for the cause of danger. You might look for why you are having this sensation that does not feel good and that is strongly communicating danger.

When you start looking for things that validate your fear, you will find them. You may start to interpret all the other thoughts and things around you as evidence to feel anxious. You might build belief systems, world views. All of this gathers more momentum around the sense of danger.

Even if you don’t directly gather evidence from the external, it may sound more like this in your head…”this is a bad feeling, I don’t like this feeling, why do I feel this way, why can’t I stop feeling this way, this is terrible, what is wrong with me.” And as you think these thoughts the sensations become more intense.

Interrupting the process of evidence gathering interrupts your anxiety. This advice is very counter to the personal development line. What I don’t want to inquire about why I feel the way I do? There is a time and place for self inquiry and when you are anxious is not it. It’s like you are on drugs, you just can’t do any good from that place.

All of this is deepens the root of anxiety.


OR

You can establish a different way of responding to your sensations. This will give your mind better information about your safety and overtime will retrain the deepest parts of your mind to interpret input more in alignment with your current reality.

1. Learn to sit in the fire.
Unless you can learn to tolerate the sensations of your own body you will always be a victim to them. We develop layers upon layers of anxiety because we fear the sensation in our body. If you can observe with kindness towards yourself and not try to fix or change them or even understand them you become free from your past and can determine the direction of your life and identity as a choice versus a reaction.
Give yourself input free time

2. Give yourself input free time.
Having time every day where the input you are receiving is inherently soothing. Be in nature, or under the covers, or anywhere that you can have quiet, subtle, pleasing input.
Don’t be left alone with your thoughts

3. Don’t be left alone with your thoughts
Your thoughts are also input. Your thoughts can create reactions just as much as loud noises or work deadlines or conflicts. If your thoughts can’t be trusted, listen to someone else’s thoughts instead. Listen to an audiobook

4. Resolve your trauma
We talked about how our mind deciphers present moment information using the past. If we have threatening painful experiences that are still running in our mind then we are already looking for and preparing to survive more of that. These experiences can be healed so that your emotional baseline becomes more neutral or better.

Some helpful nuance…
It is a great idea to direct your thoughts intentionally and even ignore some thoughts altogether. Your emotions on the hand usually gather more energy when you try and change them. Do your best to meet your emotions with compassion and your thoughts with discipline.