How to Deal With Fear & Anxiety

There’s an epidemic going around, if you haven’t heard. Actually there’s more than one.

One of the learnings we may walk away with from the virus outbreak is how terrible most of us are at dealing with our emotions.

It’s not our fault — this wisdom has been removed from our educations.

When feeling the urge to panic-buy, for example — what would it be like to deal with the panic another way, and not end up with 500 rolls of toilet paper?

Unfortunately, the modern world only trusts our analytical mind. Most of us were taught to push away the feeling part of us, to treat it as a child, less-than, a nuisance.

It’s actually considered shameful and weak to feel. To even consider allowing feeling equates to ‘wallowing’ in emotion.

And so when strong feelings arise, we don’t know what to do with them. We were never taught. And the nature of our demanding computer jobs requires that we disconnect from the physical body, which is the resource that would allow us to handle what we’re feeling.

(Ever been asked to say what you’re feeling and answered instead what you’re thinking? Yes, we are that disconnected).

So our emotions are like a hot potato. We try to throw them away to another person. Yelling or crying until someone else makes us feel better. Until someone else saves us from the pain of feeling.

We have an epidemic of making other people responsible for our emotions.

We blame others, we look for distractions, we consume endless substances to soothe ourselves.

The fear is that if we turn to face what we feel and allow it to run through our bodies, we won’t be able to bear it. Or it will never go away and we will disappear into it. And of course there’s the shame and criticism from others if we’re seen to spend any time processing our emotions rather than being stalwart.

This way of being in the world is toxic. Pent-up emotions really do have physical consequences in our biology. And in running away and making others responsible, we expend a huge amount of energy and give away our power.

And then we buy into the endless consumerism of chasing numbing substances to get away from what we think we’re not supposed to feel.

So what’s the alternative?

The alternatives aren’t very satisfying to the analytical mind. They don’t involve logic, linear processes, or predictable timeframes.

They often provoke distrust or avoidance.

That just goes to show how deep the division is between our thinking selves and our feeling selves. How strong the disdain and disrespect.

The answers lie in: 1) Reconnecting with and respecting the body and *using it to help us regulate our emotions,* 2) Starting to respect and value our emotions as valuable sources of information about our lives, 3) Learning to witness our emotions rather than be identified with and controlled by them, and 4) Allowing ourselves time to feel what we feel in a careful and supported way, such that this energy can move through us rather than being stuck.

A very helpful toolbox for me has been a mix of meditation, choosing activities that allow stress cycles to complete (physical exercise is a great one), and asking for help in the form of a friend, therapist, or coach who is willing to listen to some venting or witness me act out the emotion (a bit of sacred theater can be so very cathartic and liberating).

In other words, it’s about relating to our emotional life with awareness and curiosity, and letting the energy of emotions run through us instead of suppressing it.

This is the opposite of what most of us were taught.

When re-orienting to how we view our emotional world from judgment to respect, something that can be helpful to remember is that emotions, like thoughts, simply arise within us. We don’t have control over that. These are both natural processes within our being that we are born experiencing — except that of course we learn to feel much earlier than we learn to think and talk. The fact that we value one so much more highly than the other is a sign of the systemic imbalances in the modern world that are causing so much harm to both people and planet.

And right now we’re being forced into a re-think.

Thank you for reading & Stay in touch!

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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From The Good Men Project on Medium

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