The CounterIntuitive Thing to Do When Anxiety Strikes: Feel More

This one caught me off guard. A few days ago I woke to an Unidentified Feeling of Anxiety. Or a UFA as I now call them. There’s no two ways about it, the feeling of anxiety sucks. Ironically, labelling something that you can’t identify as “Unidentified” immediately provides a bit of breathing space. I coach people on the subject and it still happens to me very occasionally — it’s the first one this year as it goes. To be fair, one of the big parts of freeing oneself is accepting that it happens, it’s part of being human. That said, my episodes are waaaaay shorter and less painful than they used to be, like three days or so instead of three weeks.

So, what did I do? I leant in, not out. I turned into the skid and listened to my body. I know now that anxiety is a signal my body knows something that my head hasn’t caught up with, yet. I just need wait. To slow the ship, draw in the sails and go into “drift mode”. Allow myself space to feel what needs to be felt. Choosing to put yourself first is vital — health before wealth. Not an easy task when you work for yourself.

My practices toolbox including stretching, cold showering, meditation, some movement (in this case cycling) helped encourage — yes, encourage — the energy of the emotion to come through but I started with lying in bed, breathing through my nose and shaking while really concentrating on feeling. My head was going, “you must look crazy” but doing what I did is in fact the opposite of that. I then spoke to my partner about exactly what was happening. Which is easier said than done when, deep down, you don’t know what’s going on. That’s kind of the point with anxiety, it’s often a subconscious trauma from the past preventing you from letting the emotion out. The sentence, “big boys don’t cry,” has a lot to answer for!

The clue, and moment where I made a behavioural shift, came when when I noticed how hard it was to look my partner in the eye. The memory of having to force myself to open my eyes as I was saying, “This feels weird, I don’t know what I’m feeling, but saying I don’t know seems to help,” is something i’ll never forget. In that moment, I recognised I was feeling deep, buried shame for being emotional, I could feel my body was full on resisting admitting I was feeling out of control. It’s not manly to be vulnerable and not know what’s happening isn’t it? Piffle and poppycock! Polite ways of saying, absolute b_llocks.

I still don’t know 100% what my body was trying to feel but not attaching to fixing it has meant that the clouds have passed more quickly. Accepting and feeling the shame definitely caused a shift. Maybe that’s what was needed. Maybe there’s more to come. That’s a big change in my process regarding my UFAs — in fact it’s the absolute game changer — I now don’t fear them, even though the feeling sucks. My response to them is, “Oh, something’s trying to come through. I wonder what it is?” because I know anxiety is actually the healing feeling and on the other side I’m always, always grateful for the change in myself they bring.

Thanks for reading 🙂

With gratitude,

Adam

For more tools on tips to become better at expressing your emotions download my free e-guide here

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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