This week, we continue the theme of emotionality as humans. In general we are fairly incompetent at identifying and moving through various emotional states.
It's not our fault ... almost none of us grew up learning about our emotional responses and how to relate to them. Even in adulthood, we rarely encounter conscious opportunities to learn about and understand our (or others) emotions.
Therefore, emotions and emotionality will continue to be our primary focus of inquiry for the next several months.
A few weeks back, our weekly assignment was to watch the first 3 episodes of the Masterclass series The Gift of Fear. We hope you have watched them, as they are extremely enlightening. If you haven't watched, it's not too late!!
Weird as it may seem, we mostly misunderstand the nature and value of fear .... AND we conflate it with anxiety.
So, today let’s talk about continuing to grow our ability to discern the difference between fear and anxiety. From there, we will set ourselves up with some anxiety tools. Anxiety IS what we experience most often, especially in the current world situations.
Learning to process and move anxiety through us, rather than be stuck in an anxious state, makes a HUGE difference in our day-to-day experience of life.
Realizing Anxiety is NOT Fear
To begin, try one more time to follow Ellen’s direction … Raise the hair on the back of your neck. It’s important that you actually try this and not just think your way through it.
You will likely discover, as we did, that you can not do this on command. It is not a mental function, it is a physiological reaction. True fear is a response to something actually happening in our environment, a threat. Our bodies are amazing. The sensation of hair raising on the back of our neck and other intuitive reactions are a reliable warning system we all have built right in. If you have ever been under physical threat, you have experienced this.
ALL those other feelings and sensations we experience routinely are anxiety, worry and concern.
Now what? Once we identify that we are dealing with anxiety, we can start to build up our tool chest. Tools for how to process anxiety so that it doesn't run us.
To begin, practice identifying if you are experiencing fear, that response to something happening in your environment right now OR anxiety, things in our imagination or memory. Then, use the following chart to name the level of your anxiety.
Notice… Does naming the sensations and experiences as anxiety, plus determining which level of anxiety you are experiencing, begin to calm the feelings?
Another great way to build your ability to calm these feelings is to use a mindfulness app. Use it to teach and support you with simple techniques for easing anxiety. Since anxiety appears in the body, meditation and movement are two of the most powerful ways to reduce it. We suggest Head Space, Calm or Healthy Minds.
The assignment this week is ... Practice, practice, practice. Notice your feelings of anxiety, name them and use a technique from your spiffy new App to process and move the feelings through you.
