It would be incorrect to say that anxiety happens to only some of us. It would also be equally misleading to say that anxiety is normal. To those who struggle with anxiety, excessive anxiety on a daily basis, it is not normal. While some people may be slightly better at masking it within the rigmarole of daily life, most of us struggle to handle it.
Personally, I know the feeling…that choking sensation in your heart. When the unconscious flash of a certain thought gets your heartbeat racing, and you can feel its pounding even without touching your chest…like an invisible hand forcing you in a cage…that nagging feeling in your head telling you that something is not right. The stress, worry around that thought, anticipation of a future event hounds us to no end…and you just want to run away.
The 1st time I started noticing anxiety in my own life was exactly this - a sudden heaviness in the chest making it difficult for me to breathe normally. First, I thought it was the occasional asthmatic tendency that surfaces at the onset of change in season and since it was autumn knocking the doors in northern India where I was holidaying for a few days.
But it wasn’t. I could sense my heart pounding, almost knocking at my rib cage to burst out of my chest. My 6 senses had, it seemed, slowed down and an impending sense of gloom was taking over. I was confused. I had never felt like this. But I told myself, like many of us, that it was nothing and distracted myself.
Few days later it surfaced again right in the middle of the day. It was a work matter which had been playing somewhere at the back of my head for a few days. My symptoms were classical: heavy breathing, racing heartbeat, low self-esteem, a sense of failure, an impounding worry of ‘being exposed’. My brain was racing ahead of time, out of control, speculating and apprehending various scenarios of how I will be doomed, declared a failure and a looser. Such was my feeling of low self-esteem that my daughter not listening to me made me feel like I am a loser!
My struggle with anxiety didn’t end there. The episodes became lot more frequent and a tad bit severe. Every morning I would wake up with a heavy head and heart, thinking of what could go wrong in my life that day…and its pathetic for me to start my day like that. Even when I was happy, the anxiety would suddenly surface making me wonder if it was even worth being happy as it maybe, you know, very short lived.
This continued for days. The more I felt anxious and consumed by worries, anticipation of failure, a sense of being no-good, the more my environment also painted the same picture. Even the daily mundane events gave me anxiety (I was anxious when my car cleaner quit when questioned for not cleaning the car every day or not doing a good job of it. I was anxious when my business contractor did not respond on time, and I had a fallout with him).
I started to find late nights most peaceful…when there were no work or family demands on me. Dawn meant activity, expectations, work deliverables and that meant anticipation of failure!
When I started to read and research about it, I learnt that it is far more common than what we tend to read in news or social media and manifests differently in everyone. From the common examples of shaking our legs vigorously, biting our nails, twiddling our thumbs to insomnia, loss of appetite, lack of concentration etc. Most of us tend to ignore these signals for sheer lack of awareness or due to avoidance and denial.
In my own friend circle, I learnt about anxious behavior in the form of rage, extreme impatience, irritability from pent up anger. Those who are slightly introvert go into a recluse avoiding social events for fear of being judged, misunderstood or getting ‘exposed’. Parents, especially of teenagers, have become worry warts getting upset over events in their school lives (school performance, competition, relationships etc.) and as a result end up passing over their thinking patterns to the children.
Inflection point
Our mind is a magician. Our deepest thoughts, subtle fears and worries, resentment and grudges, even those subconsciously accumulated over a period time create a mountain of thought burden which builds or spoils our mental chatter - the string of thoughts that go on in our mind while we are physically doing something else. All of us have some kind of a mental chatter which could be of neutral, positive or negative nature.
Several times this mental chatter is occupied with repeated patterns of negative thoughts like worries, doubts, fear, stress, grudges, expressions of anger and resentment and the likes. I would argue that this kind of mental chatter, the repeated thinking pattern of negative thoughts, developed over long periods of time causes the inflection point of anxiety in our lives - the point at which the anxiety levels go out of bounds.
Fortunately, I recognized my mental chatter on one occasion as I was starting to feel anxious and before I could get sucked inside it, I caught it. I reflected deeply on my thinking pattern and dug deeper on their origins asking myself these questions:
Why do I think what I am thinking?
What are the events in my life that cause me to have these fears?
What is the worst that will happen, even if my fears come true?
I made it a point to actively confront my anxiety with these questions and it really helped me. Another thing that has truly worked for me is to become self-aware: which means that I am aware of my mind’s tendencies to think/react/respond in a certain way in a certain kind of a situation and then I actively ‘silence’ that chatter. I also learnt that anxiety can’t be turned off but with this habit I have found a way to control it.
When we are self-aware, we can preempt the onset of anxious thoughts and are better prepared to let the anxiety pass when it comes. Self-awareness is the 1st tool to self-care and the 1st step to managing anxiety.