Every moment of your life, your senses are taking in a constant stream of data. No matter where you are or what you are doing, your ears are picking up all sorts of sounds; all the skin on your body is feeling various levels of pressure and temperature. You are smelling, tasting, and if your eyes are open, you are seeing what’s in focus and peripheral images.
Ninety-nine (99%) of the data your brain analyzes, determines if it’s important or not, and discards or responds subconsciously to it. It does this through a very fast, but not so smart, process. Which is helpful. Imagine if you had to consciously think about every piece of data. All day, every day would be spent just sorting and labeling. If even for a few minutes you were aware of all the data coming in, you would be completely overwhelmed.
Your brain, by God’s incredible design, handles most of the information for you and only brings to your conscious awareness the things it thinks you need to focus on. This information gets relayed to your prefrontal cortex for your conscious consideration.
Most of the stories you tell, you are completely unaware of. Your brain does it in the background while you are focused on other things.
While you don’t notice the story, you do tend to notice the feelings created by the stories. Particularly if those feelings are intense and negative.
FEELINGS
Emotions are very mechanical. We don’t tend to think of feelings as being mechanical. At least I didn’t before studying the neuroendocrinology of them. I always thought of them as these ethereal floaty things that seemed to come and go with no real rhyme, reason, or logic to them.
They’re not though. There’s no happy pollen in the air that makes us happy when we breathe it in. Nor is there a sad lotion that absorbs through our skin, making us sad. And, contrary to popular belief, my wife does not have a blow-gun with angry juice she shoots me in the neck with, making me upset.
In reality, feelings follow a very straightforward and logical path. They are the product of our glands and nerves. Glands (endocrine system) do not think or make decisions on their own. They just do what they are told. And who’s calling the shots? Well, you are. That is, the meaning-making part of your brain is when it tells a story.
Now you might not remember telling yourself to feel anxious when you saw the flashing blue lights behind your vehicle on your way to church. You did though. Your subconscious, that part of your brain that’s filtering all the incoming data, made the call for you.
It said, very quickly, “Oh, this isn’t good. In fact, it’s very very bad. Something terrible is about to happen.” So it picked up the phone and dialed the adrenal glands. Those two bean-shaped blobs of tissue setting on either side of your spine by your kidneys. And the Story part of your brain said, “Adrenals, we got a situation, and it’s terrible. We’re going to need a #terrible dose of stress hormones (adrenaline, cortisol, norepinephrine) in the blood stat!”
Micro-seconds later your heart and thoughts are racing. Hands are starting to sweat, knots forming in the stomach, muscles tensing in the neck, back, and jaw. You’re really feeling that anxiety now.
ACTION
We tend to react out of our emotions. When something doesn’t feel good, i.e. we feel angry, sad, hurt, afraid, we do things to try to feel better. We utilize coping mechanisms in an attempt to soothe our self. Sometimes these coping mechanisms are helpful (we pray, we turn to a friend and process out loud, journal, or go for a run, etc.). Sometimes they’re not (we protest by yelling, screaming, defensively arguing, shutting-down, stonewalling, biting our nails, binge eating or drinking, looking at porn, etc.).
It is incredibly helpful to develop healthy coping mechanisms for navigating negative emotional experiences. It sure beats beating your head against the wall or self-sabotaging with unhealthy ones. But you can also level up and learn how to change the emotions altogether. The two together can enable the self-control that makes you master of your emotions.
What should we do about anxiety?
The key to mastering anxiety is twofold. First, you need to learn healthy coping mechanisms that help you manage your reactions to anxiety-producing situations. Next, you learn how to trace your path to anxiety backward to identify the story that’s driving the anxiety.
When you bring the unconscious story into conscious awareness, doing so gives you the ability to change the story. Change the story, change the emotional response (i.e. turn off, or at least down, the anxiety response).
If you can both turn down the anxiety response and manage it better with healthy coping mechanisms, then you are in good shape my friend.
Strategies for Managing Anxiety
There are a number of strategies counselors teach clients to help them manage anxiety better. Here are just a few:
1. STEP BACK & BREATHE
Retreating and regrouping is a good way to collect yourself before re-engaging. If possible, remove yourself from a situation for a moment (3-20 minutes) to give yourself space to settle for a moment. BREATH. The lungs are unique.
