THE ART OF ANXIETY

Anxiety—an art? Well yes we could think of it in that way. How? Let’s start from the basic NLP premise that every experience is a skill. If we start there, then yes, anxiety can be a skill—an art. After all, some people are really, really good at generating anxiety in their minds and bodies on a regular basis! I have known some people who were true masters at anxiety. They could produce anxiety in any given moment and just about anything that you bring up.

I’m writing about anxiety as a follow-up to the last article, Emotions and Stress. On the stress scale, anxiety is near the top. It is not yet panic or overwhelm, but in anxiety, a person is full of nerves, hence nervous and highly animated. What is anxiety? Most psychology books define it in the most unusually vague way. “Anxiety is free floating fear.” Don’t you love it? Free floating fear... aw ... be careful, you never know when some “free floating fear” may blow in and drop on you!

Now “free floating fear” does imply at least one thing—the object of the fear is unknown. You are afraid of something, but you are not clear about what it is, where it is, how it is, etc. So being in a state of uncertainty, there are things unknown to you, perhaps expected, and given that, then there are things to do, but that’s the hitch. You don’t know what to do. You have no control over what’s going on. Think that way and you will activate your body. You will animate your breathing, heart rate, and nerves. You will feel nervous, upset, and you want to pace or move around.

Now starting with an unknown fear, the next question for you is: How do you generally relate to the emotion of fear? Are you okay with it? Are you terrified of it? Do you experience it often? What resources do you access to handle legitimate fears? How do you handle illegitimate fears? What other mental and emotional states do you bring to and apply to fear? When you answer that, you will know what meta-states you have developed about fear, and if meta-states, then frames of mind. Do you fear fear? Do you anger at fear? Are you ashamed of fear? Do you bring calmness to your fear? Thoughtfulness? Curiosity?

The way you think about ‘free floating fear’ (and uncertainty) determines how well or how poorly you handle anxiety. This is where the cognitive distortions can really do a trip on you.

Consider the cognitive distortion of predicting the future. Of course, since you can’t (no one can!), you are actually projecting worries, frets, upsets, distresses into your imagined future. People create a lot of anxiety in this way. They project that “X will happen” and many do so dogmatically as if it is a foregone conclusion.

Consider the cognitive distortion of exaggeration. All you have to do is take a fear and exaggerate it. Blow it up so that you amplify the fear and create catastrophic scenes and imagine your post-apocalyptic world. Here catastrophizing creates lots of very toxic forms of anxiety because you will feel even more out-of-control. Consider the cognitive distortion of personalizing. Here you can think about other people’s problems, which are outside of your ‘locus of control,’ and feel anxious about what has happened or could happen to them. Do this and you will create a large batch of powerlessness for yourself and if you keep doing it— then helplessness. What a great formula for anxiety! Consider the cognitive distortion of mind-reading. Imagine things about what others think or could think, say or could say, and then believe in your intuitive powers to know what’s inside the mind and heart of others. Then you can feel anxious over these projected feelings that you impose on others.

I could go on and on. Cognitive Distortions, as infantile ways of thinking, are wonderful if you want to succeed in the Art of Anxiety. Anxiety sometimes arise due to your low self-efficacy. In fact, the lower your sense of knowledge and skills to competently handle some aspect of life, the more anxiety you can generate. Conversely, the more knowledgeable and skillful you are, the less anxiety. Also, the more you self-monitor yourself, your life, your relationship with thoughts of judgment, the more anxious you will be. In these cases, develop your knowledge and skills! Get to a training. Read a book. Sign up for some coaching.

Finally, Fritz Perls commented that “anxiety is the suppression of excitement.” And believing this, he would ask his clients, “What excitement are you pushing down and denying?” People get excited about public speaking, they want to do it, then they push that excitement down and it becomes nervous anxiety. Some get excited about becoming a Meta-Coach, then deny their excitement so it shows up as performance anxiety when they sit with a client and are watched or benchmarked. By trying to avoid failing, they make themselves nervous which increases the anxiety. Solution: fully embrace and accept that you could fail or mess up. Hold firm the thought that “it’s part of the process, that’s all.”

The bottom-line is that if you are anxious, you are thinking your way to anxiety. And if that’s the case, you can un-think that process and turn it completely around.