Mindset Shift
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Creating a diagnostic manual for mental health disorders, many decades ago, was a huge step forward in taking mental health seriously. However, one of the problems we have encountered as a society is now we often hear an unspoken “disorder” associated with certain emotional states such as anxiety.
By making anxiety a medical diagnosis, we accidentally removed some of the appreciation for its usefulness, importance, and overall place in our lives.
Instead of the usual discussions around anxiety as a pathology, this week I had the chance to talk about some of its benefits - and a new way to understand it, live with, and maybe even appreciate it.
As author Dr. Tracy Dennis Tiwary discusses, the origins of the word anxiety come from a physical feeling. A choking sensation, a feeling that was so physical it literally got caught in your throat. Fast forward a few centuries and the term is wrapped up in the struggle for separation between church and science, between soul and body, and morphed into a medical diagnosis ripe for treatment and fixing. As modern medicine has gotten more sophisticated, more disciplined, more treatment-focused, anxiety has come to be something we hope to eradicate or ignore.
There are two predominant ways to think about (and talk about) anxiety in our society right now. On one hand, it’s a medical disease. Mental health means the absence of deficiencies, of challenges, of struggle. In this view of “perfect mental health” we are almost expected to be robotic. A picture on social media or a one-dimensional person with just enough time to tuck in all the corners of imperfection. We have to find a way to process our feelings and appear happy, mindful, self-caring, patient, and loving ALL the time, OR we have to admit that we need treatment. When it is considered from this medical disease perspective, we want to “cure” it. As an illness, even a little bit of it seems dangerous (e.g. there is no good cancer).
On the other hand, anxiety is viewed as a weakness of character. A fault in us. A lack of grit, of toughness, of agility. In this view, we should be able to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, ignore and repress our worries and just get it done. Forget building ways to understand it and move through it, we have to move past it OR admit we are too weak to overcome it.
But what if we could change our mindset? Instead of a cancer that needs to be cut out or a weakness in our character, could we come to see our anxiety as a critical part of being human? As part of a spectrum of our natural feelings and reactions to the world around us? What if we could recognize how anxiety is biological, helpful, and maybe even our superpower?
What anxiety does for us:
Alert us. As many of us have discussed before, anxiety is part of your biological warning system. Anxiety alerts you to the presence of the new, of the potentially dangerous, or the monumental. Even if it is not a saber tooth tiger, anxiety is a sense that we can still tap into and listen to when it comes up. In this way, anxiety is protective.
Pump us up. Anxiety causes a spike of dopamine in our brain, the feel good hormone. Now before you ask how we could feel good while feeling anxious, dopamine serves another purpose as a neurotransmitter in our brain - connecting and coordinating activities to help us meet our goals. To plan, prepare, pump up and rally the troops. To help us get things done, make things happen, and achieve our goals. In this way, anxiety is productive.
Connect us. When we feel anxiety, we also see increases of oxytocin in our bloodstream. That’s the love hormone, the one that helps us make connections to others, find relationships and forge bonds. Oxytocin primes us to seek out others, to find support from other humans when we need it, and to make important social connections that help sustain us in times of need. In this way, anxiety supports us.
Prepare us. Have you ever been on stage about to deliver a speech, or in the wings about to perform, and been overcome by the butterflies, the nausea, the racing heart? Anxiety is also our body preparing to perform a task. Waking up your brain (with increased oxygen, aka that racing heart) to make you more focused, more present, more alert. It’s preparing you internally, for what you have to deliver externally. In this way, anxiety is strengthening us.
When you think of anxiety in these ways, it makes it very plain to see that we may need to change how we talk to our kids, or watch our kids experience this normal, protective, productive, supportive and sometimes strengthening emotion. Of course, I am not in any way denying that anxiety can be harmful, that we need other tools to manage and harness it, and maybe even treatment and/or medication that can help support someone, but for the purposes of this discussion we are focusing on routine anxiety. The kind we all experience and too often feel crappy about. We also tend to get anxious about anxiety in our kids because any whisper of it can flood us with fear of an “anxiety disorder” that drives us to feel even more anxious about anxiety.
How we can help reframe anxiety for our children:
Experience it. We can support our children to manage the hard feelings, the sadness, the fear, the uncertainty. Instead of trying to distract them (or fix them) out of these hard feelings, we can support them in learning to manage them. To be at peace with them. Learning to feel and accept all of their emotions will help them to find the tools they need for the future that we cannot control for them.
Accept it. Try mindfulness exercises that talk about welcoming your anxiety as a friendly visitor, one that you allow in, have a bit of tea with, and then send away. You may not invite anxiety to spend the weekend, but you don’t just refuse to answer the door. Those exercises help us to accept that our anxiety isn’t going anywhere, and instead of fearing it or feeling disappointed when it arrives, we can be curious about the information it is telling us. As parents, we can practice sitting with our children’s anxiety, validating it, and accepting it as a normal part of the human experience. Imagine how much pressure it lifts when our kids find out WE are not anxious about their feelings of anxiety!
Learn from it. Since we know that anxiety is information, we can focus on helping our children to understand it. To learn about what it is telling us (e.g. we have a big test we need to study more for, or a performance that means a lot to us) and turn it into action.
There is so much to be said on this topic…and that’s why this is only part 1 of my 2-part episode with Dr. Tracy Dennis Tiwary. Be sure to listen on Friday for part 2, and check out next week’s newsletter for more.
Warmly,
