Three truths about anxiety that will make you furious

I’ve spent my recent past working with my body, through somatic therapy, breathwork, and the kind of embodied practices that require getting out of your head and into your skin.

Hi,

I’ve spent my recent past working with my body, through somatic therapy, breathwork, and the kind of embodied practices that require getting out of your head and into your skin.

It’s been a long process of helping my body heal, and a few of the things I’ve learned have made me genuinely angry, at least at first blush.

I mean truly, lash out angry at the pure audacity of them…and yet, they are also true.

There are three of them that seem to raise the hackles of most entrepreneurs when I say them. I even got an intensely negative visceral reaction from my chiropractor when I told them the first one.

I’m sharing them with you now, and I know they will make you want to punch through the computer screen, but I ask you to sit with it, and give me the benefit of the doubt (especially with the first one).

All anxiety is a lie

Even my very hard to anger wife flipped out when she heard this one, but let me be clear about this first. Your anxiety is real. What you feel is real. But the information anxiety is giving you? That’s a lie.

Anxiety is what happens when you trigger your fight, flight, fawn, or freeze response and there is exactly one legitimate reason for that response to activate.

It should only be triggered when you are in immediate physical danger. Someone is attacking you. A car is careening toward you. A wild animal is charging. That’s it. That’s the list.

I was on safari a few years ago, and the wildest thing wasn’t the lions or the elephants, it was watching hundreds of animals grazing peacefully in open fields, including predators. The zebras weren’t having panic attacks. The gazelles weren’t frozen in existential dread. They were calm, alert, and fundamentally at peace.

Why? Because they weren’t in immediate physical danger.

Those prey animals have finely tuned nervous systems that know the difference between actual threat and potential threat. When the lioness stands up and starts stalking, then they run.

Until that moment, they eat grass.

Meanwhile, we humans sit in our safe homes, in front of our computers, toiling away on our businesses, and our bodies are screaming that we’re about to die because we have a deadline, or someone might leave a bad review, or our editor hasn’t responded to our email in three days.

None of these things are going to kill you. Even if they will eventually, not one of those is an immediate threat, but your body doesn’t know that. It’s responding to perceived danger as if it were real danger, flooding you with cortisol and adrenaline meant to help you fight or flee from something that isn’t actually there.

This is why anxiety is a lie. Not because you’re making it up, but because the alarm system is broken. It’s a smoke detector going off because you burned toast, not because your house is on fire.

Emotions only last 90 seconds

They feel like they last forever, but the neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor discovered that the initial physical reaction to an emotion, triggered by a surge of chemicals like adrenaline, will naturally subside within 90 seconds.

Ninety seconds.

The chemical cascade that creates fear, anger, sadness, joy surges through your body, and then it’s done.

The wave crashes over you, and then it recedes.

So why do we feel anxious for hours? Days? Why does a single critical comment ruin your whole week?

Because we ruminate. We tell ourselves stories about the feeling. We replay the moment. We imagine future scenarios. We feed the emotion, and it feeds us until we’re locked in a cycle that has nothing to do with the original 90-second experience.

The Buddha called this “the second arrow.” The first arrow is the thing that happens, whether its rejection, bad news, disappointment, anger, or something else. That arrow hurts, but the second arrow? That’s the one we shoot at ourselves. That’s the story we tell about what the first arrow means, the catastrophizing, the shame spiral, the endless mental replay.

The first arrow is 90 seconds. The second arrow is everything after that, and it’s entirely optional.

Every disappointment is a first arrow. What we do with it determines whether we’re going to spend the next three days in bed or the next hour processing and moving forward.

Boredom and anxiety are two sides of the same coin

I got pretty good at dealing with the first two on this list, but more recently I learned that boredom and anxiety aren’t opposites. They’re the same thing.

Both are states of dysregulation in your nervous system telling you something is wrong, that you’re not safe, that you need to do something right now.

Anxiety is the gas pedal stuck to the floor. Boredom is riding the brake while the engine revs. Both are your body’s way of saying it doesn’t feel settled.

What we should actually be striving for, and what those zebras on the savanna have figured out, is peace.

We shouldn’t be chasing excitement or stimulation, and certainly not the constant ping-pong between “I’m freaking out” and “I’m so bored I could scream.”

What we really want is ease, and a feeling of peace.

This is hard to hear because we’ve romanticized the anxiety-ridden genius who needs to be slightly miserable to create anything good. We’ve confused discomfort with depth, and chaos with creativity.

But peace isn’t numbness. It’s not checking out or giving up. It’s the calm, alert state where you can actually do your best work. It’s where the zebras live most of their lives. They are present, aware, and responsive, but not panicking.

Your body is not your enemy, but it is often confused. We spend so much time trying to get our mindset right, but we forget that our bodies went through all the same trauma as our minds, and we just expect it to process it.

If I’ve learned nothing else in my life, it’s that my body is a whole different organism than my mind. I often say that I’m just a three pound blob of fat driving a decomposing mech without ever being given an instruction manual.

I know what happens when I punch buttons, but we are not the same. Bodies process things differently than minds, which is why we all need to be doing bodywork and mindset work.

Otherwise, we’ll find success and still feel unsettled. Our anxiety will keep flaring up to tell you something is unsafe, trying to protect you from success just like it has tried to protect you from every other new potential danger in your life that came with the unknown.

When anxiety tells you that missing your word count today means you’ll never finish, that’s a lie. When your nervous system interprets a hypothetical problem as a mortal threat, that’s a malfunction. When you feel like you need to be either panicking or numbing out to survive, that’s a false choice.

You have a 90-second window to feel your feelings. After that, you’re choosing the story.

Photo by Sydney Latham on Unsplash