I’ve been thinking a lot about anxiety lately. Particularly the fact that we (or at least I) have been trained to not trust it. I don’t know how many times I have read or heard the term “your anxiety is lying to you”. We are trained to combat anxiety by deciding it’s lying to us. Lying about the future. Lying about what is coming. Lying about everything. There have been many times in my life where I have been anxious about something and it has turned out to be totally fine. That happens a lot. So, many times our anxiety is lying to us. But what happens when our anxiety is just our intuition screaming at the top of its lungs? Telling us this person, situation, job, relationship, etc. is not for us. We are on the wrong path. For women we have also been trained to not trust ourselves. Society has been sending us messages our entire lives about why we shouldn’t trust ourselves. But lately I have been thinking; what would happen if I trusted my anxiety?
I think there are three kinds of anxiety.
(I’ll probably read this tomorrow and decide there are four or five but for now let’s go with three.)
One is that anxiety you get before you’re about to do something scary and new but exciting. The nervous-excitment-anxiousness. The butterflies.
Another is the kind of anxiety about the future. Anxiety about money, about a career, a child’s future etc. This kind of anxiety means you are living in the future. I believe it was in “The Power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle where I learned about combating this kind of anxiety. You want to live in the future enough to have a little bit of a plan, but don’t spend too much time there. Sure you should set aside money for retirement but don’t spend every minute of your life worrying about it. Be there enough to plan, then come back to the present.
I am also starting to believe in a third kind of anxiety. The kind that is really your body trying to tell you something. I have experienced this kind of anxiety a few times in my life. For me it comes from my gut. Deep inside me there is a knot that then sends messages throughout my entire body making me nauseated, shaky, makes my heart race and makes me want to completely disappear. My other kinds of anxiety can sometimes feel similar. But it doesn’t come from that deep center of my body. That knot deep down in the pit of my stomach.
I used to believe (and by “used to” I mean like last week) that I shouldn’t trust any kind of anxiety. All anxiety is bad and needs to be dealt with or medicated away. But now I am starting to wonder what it would look like if I explored which anxiety I need to breath and work through and which anxiety is actually my body (or intuition, force, universe, etc.) trying to tell me I am on the wrong path, that person is not good for you, this situation is not for you, etc. What if we learned to trust our bodies?
Now a few thoughts about anxiety on a larger scale.
Growing up and after being diagnosed with an anxiety disorder I started to see a trend of people my age being diagnosed with anxiety (or at least experiencing what I recognized as anxiety but unfortunately had non understanding parents around them). And now I am reading about how Gen Z is also experiencing high levels of anxiety. Many blame social media and phones, which, I agree are not helping the issue necessarily. And part of it could be because more and more people are opening up about mental health so it’s more okay to talk about. But I fully believe that a lot of it is a reaction to the broken world we live in. The analogy I love is that us sensitive people are the canaries in the coal mine. We sense that things are toxic before everyone else. With the Internet comes more opportunities to learn about the experiences of people who aren’t like us. Which is a beautiful thing. But it is also opening our eyes (especially us privileged white people) to a world of so much suffering. So much brokenness. The system we are living in doesn’t work for a vast majority of people. And on top of that, our planet, our home, the only place we can currently live, is dying! Our world is literally melting around us. I wish the older generations would look at the newer generations and instead of saying, “they are broken and coddled and can’t handle life,” and say, “what is broken in this world and how can we help fix it?”
What if we all looked at our own anxieties, that deep knot in our stomach, and think, “what is broken or wrong in my life and how do I fix it?”