How I create my anxiety

This morning I woke up anxious. Or, more accurately, immediately upon waking my first conscious thought was about work and then I felt anxious. This morning, I noticed the thought, let it go, and then started to feel better.

Now, it doesn’t always happen that way. I don’t always catch it. And when I miss it, I’ll often find myself trying to do something to make myself feel better. I’ve been known to pop out of bed at 5am and start working before even making coffee (decaf always because, anxiety).

Learning how my emotions work has been a powerful tool on my journey to just have a better experience of being human. There was a time (around 37 years of my life, to be specific) that I felt completely at the mercy of my emotions. Something would happen out in the world and I would feel something in response, and often that would feel really bad. Cue doing something, anything to feel better.

You may have noticed in your own life that when you do things from a place of feeling bad, often the outcome of that action is not as positive as you would have hoped. That has certainly been the case for me. And that’s actually how I learned about this initially. I was focused on getting better results in my life and I worked backwards to find my out of control shitty emotions at the root of it.

It helps to understand as a starting point how your nervous system works because it’s often sympathetic nervous system activation that creates those two dominant shitty feelings: anxiety and anger.

Your autonomic nervous system has two sub-systems, the parasympathetic and sympathetic. Your nervous system has a lot of keeping-you-alive functions (like making your organs work without you having to think about it), but it also regulates your fight, flight, freeze (and sometimes fawn) responses. This is the part of nervous system function that affects your emotional experience of life and over which you actually have some modicum of control.

I’m not going to get too deep in the weeds this morning, because work is actually calling, but I wanted to provide this illustration to get you thinking. I woke up this morning safe in my bed and my body went into flight mode. That’s what anxiety is, flight mode.

Why? There was no threat. There had been no noise to make me think there was an intruder in my house. I simply had a thought that my brain interpreted as threatening and my body responded as though there was something to run from.

This is all fine and good, but if your response to me is something along the lines of, “but, Talia, that thought is true. I have lots of legitimate things to worry about,” then we still have work to do. My response would be for now, don’t believe everything (or possibly anything) that you think.

But that’s a topic for its own post.