For those who suffer from anxiety, like myself and many others, it seems that our in-built response to arising anxiety is to avoid it at all costs. This may be especially true for those of us who have faced traumatic anxiety or recurring panic. These deeply embedded response patterns can activate at any time, without warning, as if someone is flicking a switch without telling us. We might find ourselves asking, “Where is this switch flicker and why won’t they just get out of our house?”.
The switch flicker lies in our cellular, implicit memory, which is unconscious but can too often make itself extremely conscious and take over our brain, mind and body. From a neuroscientific perspective, the neurons or nerve cells that form the basis of the nervous system communicate with one another through neurotransmitters, eventually creating neural pathways. The neural pathways in our brain that play host to anxious patterns have become deeply engrooved through repetition, sometimes deeply enough to allow the high charge of anxiety to present itself whenever, wherever, regardless of the situation we find ourselves in. As Neuropsychologist Donald Hebb famously stated, “neurons that fire together, wire together”. Hebb coined the phrase in 1949 to shed light on the process of neural pathway formation and how they are reinforced through repetition.
At this point, our brain is simply reenacting what it already knows, as if it’s playing the role that it has been trained for. Our neurons are simply gossiping with one another and, without knowing, we have engineered a system of response and experience that fills our world with the dominant but unwanted filter of danger, risk and threat. We often retreat in anxious situations as our brain is literally telling us that we are in trouble. Consciously we know that the current situation doesn’t warrant this level of vigilance, but unconsciously (and the unconscious is always playing the predominant part in our experience) we are convinced that there is an active threat and huge danger awaits us.
Where is this anxiety actually coming from? Firstly, we all have what’s called ‘basic anxiety’. This is the level of anxiety that we all carry within ourselves that wards us off from threats. It’s an evolutionary mechanism that taught our primal ancestors to survive, as they were constantly faced with the very real danger of death around every corner. Those that didn’t develop this form of anxiety and vigilance simply didn’t make it. Survival of the fittest and all that. In this case, the fittest didn’t mean the strongest, the most successful predator or the most skilled hunter. It meant those that were most aware of the threat to survival. Our predecessors were literally being hunted by wild animals daily, along with the threat they faced from each other for dominance and hierarchy. The basic anxiety switch kept them alive.
From an evolutionary perspective, and with modern research on ancestral and intergenerational trauma/anxiety, these fears are completely valid. Unconsciously, we all still carry a wild animal within the deeper layers of our consciousness and are willing to bring that out in moments of real danger. Our minds can react to imagined danger in much the same way. Why? Because we have been hard-wired that way for millenia. The programming hasn’t changed much, although it appears that our world is much safer. But our world still presents real and imagined threats at every turn. And our evolutionary survival instinct still remains highly operational.
When we push our anxiety away, we’re pushing away that which helped human beings to get to where we are. Anxiety is not a demon, but we treat it as if it were haunting us. When we confuse real and imagined danger, it’s clearly problematic and lessens our freedom and ability to move in the world in the way that we want, in a way that brings growth and confidence. Avoidance behaviours can leave us feeling imprisoned and deprived of our deeper yearnings for fulfillment. We impose upon ourselves a selfquarantined zone in order to not feel the threat of danger. And when anxiety colours our world, it no longer matters if the danger is real or imagined, because it simply is. Logic and reasoning lose their power in the face of the strong emotional current that washes over us repeatedly like a continual tidal wave.
Basic survival anxiety aside, recognising where this anxiety attached itself to unwarranted experiences is a must. Our anxious residue can have its roots in fears of failure, abandonment, past trauma, actual threats to life, or a threat to the ego and self-integration, leaving us feeling fragmented and defective. The ego always fears losing an aspect of itself that it holds dearly, because the ego is a naturally insecure substitute for the true self that lies at the core of our being beyond conscious awareness. Why is the ego insecure? Because on a fundamental level, it knows that it is not who we truly are. It’s an imposter that’s always seeking to add more credentials to itself and to give itself more ground to stand on. It can hardly survive without continuous add-ons, much like a never ending and exhausting maintenance project. Glimpsing beyond ego can help us to loosen up our attachment to the project and its results. Accordingly, ego itself can be the source of great anxiety as its core delusionary fear is the imagined extinction of itself. However, this article is not about the ego or our spiritual essence, so back to anxiety and how to work with it. Regardless of neuroscientific, evolutionary or psychoanalytic reasonings, the fact remains that stuck, lodged and unprocessed anxious residue sits in our mind and body and attaches itself to an array of our experiences. Triggers and familiar situations can carry an associated anxious charge within them, as our memory will naturally present to us what it already knows about a particular experience, time or place. Our brain’s hippocampus is primarily involved with memory, and prolonged anxiety can drastically affect its ability to lay down new memories of particular events. Trying to think our way out of strong anxiety simply doesn’t work regardless of our brain’s highly developed neocortex region, responsible for higher functions such as logic and analysis.
So, what can we do? Could we be courageous enough to actually trust our anxiety? To trust the stress responses that are surging through us in that moment? After all, aren’t they trying to protect us? Dr. Gabor Mate refers to these outdated survival responses as “stupid friends”. He insists that “the stupid friend is the one who helped you in a particular way for a particular reason, and is still trying to help in that same way.” Buddhist meditation expert Tsoknyi Rinpoche calls these responses “beautiful monsters”, with the idea that what scares us internally may be our friend in disguise. Both descriptions allude to the concept that these survival patterns carry an inherent goodness within them, regardless of their misunderstanding of our current events.
Modern mindfulness tells us to welcome adverse and uncomfortable emotions, to overcome the deeply ingrained resistance to them that is the source of our ongoing entanglement and their continued proliferation. But I’d like to take it one step further and promote the possibility of an authentic trust within our anxious processes, even within their very worst, most intolerable aspects. For me, an example of this is when the worst anxiety possible presents itself, I’ve begun to make the conscious attempt to switch from the ancient, knee-jerk reaction of trying to get rid of it, to opening up to the experience of completely trusting it. Moving into a space of deep trust automatically lessens it and transforms it into a source of energy that begins to feel what I’ve heard referred to as wisdom.
The constricted energy begins to flow and instead of being a hindrance, it becomes a precursor to peace and a deeper form of intelligence, one that I am usually lacking in. The mind becomes pliable, workable and opens up to avenues that are typically beyond my field of vision when so much of my energy is invested in contracting around and obstructing the flow of misunderstood anxiety. Fighting against our own energy will never truly work and can only offer, at best, a temporary bandage. I’ve come to see that this energy is blocked intelligence in disguise, attempting to manifest itself. Once trusted, it can begin to show itself for what it really is, innate knowing and powerful intuition that wants to be free and unrestricted.
Who is restricting it? I am, unconsciously, through the associated memory that it was once uncomfortable and the belief that it will be so again. But through learning to deeply trust, it heals and the hippocampus begins to form new memories around it. Pleasurable and empowering memories, rather than vulnerable and disempowering. This emotional alchemy can only take place through deeply trusting the raw, unprocessed and uncomfortable experiences that we still carry deep within ourselves. Experiences that are crying out to be transformed, if we can gather the courage and hearty determination to do so. If we can, we are re-wiring the brain for happiness, rather than fear. This is neuroplasticity at work, as the brain begins to reshape itself through conscious experience, directly and positively affecting unconscious experience for the better.
Anxiety is always going to be there until we face it deeply. Putting ourselves into the furnace of anxiety with the aid of deep trust will only burn what we are not, and show us who we truly are when temporary obscurations are burned away. Anxiety is extremely uncomfortable but it will not kill us. Perhaps, not facing it is what slowly kills us. Putting barriers on our hearts can only offer us a restricted life experience, and one which we long to break free from. Without doubt, anxiety is the affliction of our age, but it doesn’t have to be. We can take back our power and bring our brains and bodies back into genuine flow and balance, and when we do, then we’ll know freedom. And when we know freedom, we’ll know pure joy.
Support Our Campaign
We rely on the generosity of the public to fund our work and so far together we have achieved great things! Please do continue to support us so we can provide future generations in Ireland with the resources to recognise and talk about their emotions, and equip them to navigate the ever-changing world around them as they grow
