Today's Reading
Insight, it must be emphasized, is never enough. It is the yin without the yang. A "good idea" needs to land in the day-to-day reality of your existence. It needs to motivate a change in behavior. The parallel would be to sit with a beatific smile on your face while you are on your meditation cushion thinking lovely thoughts but then get up and are furious because someone has done one of a thousand things that disrupt your fixed agenda. The cushion experience may bring plenty of insight. All is lost, as if it had never been, if changed action doesn't reflect your nobler thoughts!
Getting that bigger sense of yourself starts with at least a partial willingness to feel in your bones and your soul, "Anxiety is not all of who I am. Yes, it can affect my whole body and especially my instincts and feelings. It can confuse me. It can devastate me. Nonetheless, 'I' am not anxiety and anxiety is not what I am."
This shift changes how you see yourself and your ability to connect and cope. It also changes the way you will think about and experiment with creative change in the actions and behaviors that bring your best intentions to life.
When anxiety seems to be running the show, what's needed is a passionate, life-affirming response. Using self-therapy that connects insight and effective action puts you at the center of change. The gifts self-therapy brings are three-fold: 1) needed insight into how your life could be calmer and (much) more pleasurable; 2) a renewal of self-trust that you can be in charge of any change; 3) presence of mind to choose your responses, rather than being driven by habitual reactions.
Impossible? In one great gulp, maybe yes. Through lived daily experiences—and a far more self-supporting way of thinking about them—it makes a lot of sense.
The chapter headings here are self-explanatory. Dive in wherever a heading tells you, "This is for me." Trust your instincts for positive change. Trust, too, that the way the book is written, core ideas appear and reappear, just as they will in your own mind.
When you do feel fragile or extra distressed, you will want something to hold on to in those moments. I have written some chapters (part two) to use in exactly that way.
It was only through observing and caring for our family member that I fully realized how dangerous high levels of anxiety or all-consuming dread can be. Also, that this is more than a mental health issue: not just the whole self needs understanding, it is a whole-body response and care that offers essential benefits.
Everything I thought I knew had to be revised.
All the emergency measures offered here involve the body and ways to acknowledge and soothe the messages coming from the brain (especially the amygdala and hippocampus) that set up whole-body stress responses and rising levels of stress hormones (including cortisol). These are magnificent lifesaving responses in an emergency. They are far less so when stress hormone levels are stuck on "high."
(The amygdala is where "fear memories" are stored, some of which may be triggered by a new situation. More positively, the amygdala is also involved in rewards. Nothing in our whole-body systems works independently—how could it?)
Learning and practicing ways to soothe yourself is basic self-care— and makes so much more sense once you know what involuntary physiological and neurological effects accompany chronic or acute anxiety. Using your body (and breath) to calm your mind is wonderful body-mind cooperation.
When your situation is less urgent and you can manage to soothe yourself so things feel less urgent, you can access your "emotional brain" plus your "thinking brain"—the prefrontal cortex and the last area of the brain to develop in you. That's also the last area of the brain to develop in our species, 250 million years after the initial "body brain" or "survival brain" that does such magnificent work for your survival but cannot help you think your way out of difficult or challenging situations.
My training has been psychological and spiritual, which brings understanding and meaning. This is profound. And as we look for a whole-self, whole-body picture, it is quite obviously limited! Chronic or acute anxiety impacts your "moods" and outlook—and your whole body, along with your fundamental sense of self and self-trust. This affects your interactions with other people, including (or especially) those you care about most.
Know, too, that you are inevitably dealing with your own anxiety in a time of unprecedented global stress, chaotic demands, crazy competitiveness, and galloping anxiety in all age groups. Everywhere you look there are gross imbalances of power. We feel that deep inside ourselves. Yet, it's widely expected that you will deal with that external stress, and the anxiety that comes with it, individually. And if that doesn't work, you may be referred to services that will be stretched, necessarily fitting you into a treatment formula that only touches the edge. But even if you get superb help, no therapist or psychologist can be with you at every moment. Nor should they be.
...
