Ep 6: Worry, Avoidance, Excitement, and Dread

If you’re someone that suffers from anxiety you know what that physical tension can feel like. You can feel  debilitated in social situations or feel totally restless depending on how severe the level of your anxiety. 

Today we’re exploring 4 emotions connected with anxiety and how you can reframe your thoughts to gain more control around these emotions to lower your levels of anxiety.

Emotional Coping Mechanisms

Avoidance and worry are two ways we attempt to cope with anxiety, but that ultimately makes anxiety worse. In this episode I’m going to share Brené Brown’s definitions from her book, Atlas of the Heart, which is linked below and highly recommended. Words are important and the meaning we assign to them makes a world of difference to how we can react and respond to them.

Avoidance

Atlas of the Heart Definition: not showing up and often spending a lot of energy zigzagging around and away from that thing that feels like it’s consuming us.

A healthy way to deal with and process our emotions doesn’t come naturally to many of us, myself included. It’s easy to fall into the habit of avoiding emotions. We avoid feeling them and we avoid confronting or digging for the reason we even default to avoidant behaviors. Avoidance is strongly connected to anxiety and though we feel less vulnerable in the short-term, we are never less afraid in the long run.

“Avoidance is the best short-term strategy to escape conflict, and the best long-term strategy to ensure suffering.” -Brendon Burchard

Worry

Atlas of the Heart Definition: a chain of negative thoughts about bad things that might happen in the future.

Although we like to think and say we can’t help but worry, the truth is worry can be changed and it is in fact optional. When we try to suppress our worry we make things worse. The trick is that we have to address worry in a way that gets to the root cause. Included at the end of these show notes are journaling prompts to help you get to the root cause of worry.

Aside from journaling your way to the root cause, doing things to interrupt your worries like breathing, meditating, or moving your body has proven to be extremely helpful. Talking about it with someone you trust can be another great way to handle worry.

One of the key ideas to keep in mind with worry is that it’s about the future and not about being present. So anything that will return you to the present moment is going to minimize worry and lower your anxiety.

Dread

Atlas of the Heart Definition: occurs frequently in response to high-probability negative events; its magnitude increases as the dreaded event draws nearer. 

Like worry, feeling dread is also about anticipating future events. It’s about the negative anticipation that increases your level of anxiety and creates a more unpleasant experience. The more anticipation we have around a negative event the greater our anxiety.

Excitement

Atlas of the Heart Definition: an energized state of enthusiasm leading up to or during an enjoyable activity. However it doesn't always feel great. 

Excitement is related to anxiety because the bodily sensation is practically identical. They feel the same way, and the only variance is in how we label and define the event or situation. When there is more positivity associated with the thing, we label it exciting. When there is more negativity associated with the thing we call it anxiety.

In this episode I share an Emotion Recipe that can change the way you process and assign your emotions, and it starts with identifying the sensation and then labeling it.

This weeks tool is Worry Journaling:

1. What am I worried about? Fill the page, write down all the things you are worried about, just let it flow out, don't think about it, just fill the page. 
2. Then take one of your worries from your list and ask yourself: How much space is this worry taking up?
3.  Is it true? What’s the evidence that the thought is true? That it’s not true?
4.  What’s the probability that what I’m scared of will actually happen? If the probability is low, what are some more likely outcomes? Is there another possible outcome that I am not seeing?
5. Is this worry solvable? And if so, what are some things I can do? Make a list of ideas of what to do.
6. If the worry is unsolvable at this time, is there a way I can accept it?
7. Is the thought helpful? How will worrying about it help me and how will it hurt me?
8. What would I say to a friend who had this worry?

This Week’s Quote:

 “Be careful what you water your dreams with. Water them with worry and fear and you will produce weeds that choke the life from your dream. Water them with optimism and solutions and you will cultivate success. Always be on the lookout for ways to turn a problem into an opportunity for success. Always be on the lookout for ways to nurture your dream.”  ― Lao Tzu

Resources:

Atlas of the Heart by Brené Brown

 The Dance of Fear by Harriet Lerner