Anxiety Thoughts
What is anxiety?
Well firstly there are the symptoms that you get
1.
Body
a.
Light headed
b.
Fast breathing
c.
Heart pumping quickly
d.
Maybe wanting the loo
2.
Behaviour/Intention
a.
Manage the threat through
i.
Escape
ii.
Control
iii.
Reassurance
3.
Attention
a.
Focus on threat or escape
4.
Cognitions
a.
Past, present future threats or escapes
Trigger
There seems two types of trigger, one that relates to an
object, one that relates to our being
Object based triggers for anxiety are the belief something
will be threatening. Fear is present threat, anxiety is the experience of
future threat, it might happen. The threat can relate to something you want or don’t
want to happen, anxiety is the feeling that you aren’t safe.
So you might be frightened of being robbed, or of failing an
exam. With the latter your fear is you
wont get something you want. Anxiety can also point to the sense something bad
could happen, a sense of foreboding as you walk through woods at night, the
sense that you aren’t safe as you are breaking your safety rules.
Being based triggers sees anxiety, then places anxiety on a
continuum with “being anxiety” moving closer towards dread or angst.
The triggers here to anxiety would be ones that threaten
your identity, such as a partner leaves you, or you do something which is morally
very contrary to the values that you have lived by or the fear of death.
That anxiety is a threat to being or non being then it allows connects with freedom,
as we are free we can change our existence, therefore our being is under threat
from freedom.
This then can see decisions as a source of anxiety. Anxiety
relates to freedom therefore it also relates to choice. We are free to choose,
we are responsible for having chosen but we could choose anything, we are
uncertain in our choice as we have limited information and we don’t know what
the consequences of our choices are, nor how the world will be in which we
choose. Here is some of the tension of
anxiety that we are free but responsible, free but there will be limiting factors
through what happens in the world and our mortality.
When anxiety then is triggered by freedom there is the sense
that it brings us back to our human condition, free but limited, free but
responsible. Anxiety then having the sense of a call back to ourselves and our
existential home. Anxiety is then the
feeling that moves us from the sense of ourselves as an object to rather a
process.
Evolutionary\physiology understanding
Anxiety is activated within the sympathetic nervous system
and prepares the body to
fight\flight\freeze. As the threat
becomes actual then the anxiety can develop into anger or fear.
What can be helpful?
1.
See that what I’m doing is valuable and its ok
to feel anxiety whilst doing it
2.
See that the threat is overstated
3.
Move my attention from the threat to something
less threatening
4.
Enhance my soothing system
5.
Seeing that anxiety is a call for us back to
ourselves and our existence
