Anxiety is Not What You Think It Is
By Holly McCorriston
Hello Kindersley and area from your friendly neighbourhood life coach and mental fitness trainer. Just as a quick reminder as to who I am, my name is Holly McCorriston and I worked as a pharmacist in the Kindersley community from 2009 until December 2020. I left the profession to seek alternative ways of enabling and empowering people to look after themselves in a more holistic way.
Today I wanted to write to you about how anxiety is not what you think it may be. With talk of mental health and wellness becoming more common, most of us (including many medical professionals) do not have a good understanding of what anxiety is.
A newer definition of anxiety is given in a book called AnxietyRX by a Canadian medical doctor named Dr. Russell Kennedy, MD. He describes anxiety as simply: a thought process. Now, this might be confusing for some of you who are familiar with anxiety being a debilitating, overtaking feeling in your body.
However, anxiety itself is not the pain or feeling in your body. Anxiety is strictly the thought process. Your overactive imagination off in the non-existent future, full of “what ifs, warnings, and worst case scenarios” says Dr. Kennedy.
Those scenarios are often unrelated to what’s actually happening to you in the present moment. You are not “present” but in the future. So the thought process by itself is not painful. If you think of an example of stubbing your toe: when you think about stubbing your toe, that’s not painful. The sensation (in your body) of actually stubbing your toe is what’s painful.
So what is the painful, debilitating part of this experience then?!
The painful part of what anxiety is what Dr. Kennedy calls alarm. Alarm is stuck energy or trauma in your body. And trauma is anything that you have experienced too much, too fast, or too soon, causing that energy to remain stuck in your body without being discharged properly by your nervous system.
While trauma seems like a “scary” word, you also need to realize that it served a purpose when you were a child and it kept you safe. It may have been unsafe or unfavourable for you to express your energy in the way you needed to (kids can be loud, active, or chaotic) so by suppressing your experiences, you were more likely to be loved and accepted by your caregivers.
The problem with this is that as an adult, that stuck energy or alarm in the body can become activated by unrelated experiences or thought processes and you may not even realize what’s happening until you are overcome by the alarm-anxiety feedback loop.
Alarm is a signal in your body that something was unresolved or unexpressed and it actually has nothing to do with what’s happening in the present moment. This can be activated by anxiety (your thoughts being in the future). And when alarm in our body has been reactivated, then that can trigger the thought process of anxiety: “Oh my god, what’s happening? My heart is beating, I’m getting sweaty. My breathing is accelerating.”
What the entire world needs to realize about anxiety is that it has never killed anyone. No one has ever died from a panic attack in the history of the world. We are simply experiencing overwhelming feelings that we have not been willing to feel. And when this happens, we stuff it down and treat it by numbing it with medications, alcohol, drugs, and TV because we don’t want to feel it. Yet the longer we don’t feel it, the more these sensations will get bigger and more prominent and try to get our attention.
Please know the alarm in your body is there for a reason. It was safe and appropriate and what you had to do to survive when you were young. AND it’s no longer serving you.
What happened to you in your lifetime is not your fault. And what happens next is your responsibility.
So how do we solve this anxiety problem in our communities, our culture, our world?
I believe it’s integral that we begin to acknowledge that anxiety and alarm (trauma) are different things. We need to acknowledge that we’re disconnected from our bodies. We need to acknowledge that we can use the sensations of alarm in our bodies as a tool to heal from this feedback loop and interrupt the patterns by creating awareness and coming back to the present moment. When we can begin to notice the sensations in our body that we’re experiencing and without judging them, we can create space to get curious which begins to break the patterns and pathways that perpetuate the cycle.
Noticing what is happening in our body as the observer begins to dissolve the patterns that shift us to stress, anxiety, judgment, blame, and shame. It starts to create neural pathways that create calm, focus, and peace and offer more access to joy, creativity, and curiosity.
I do strongly recommend for anyone that’s new to my work to start a mental fitness practice as we can use the simple processes to shift out of these loops of anxiety and alarm.
- Name what’s happening. Notice. What’s going on in your body? If your pattern is to have your heart start beating then instantly the thoughts come in and they go, “oh no, it’s happening again?” What can you do instead of shifting into that pattern? Name what’s happening. “Oh, I am experiencing some alarm in my body and it’s triggering the anxiety in my head.”
- Use the awareness to pause and sense the feelings of alarm.
- Sense your heartbeat, your breathing rate, the temperature of your breath in your nostrils, the temperature of your skin, the feeling of sweat beads on your forehead, the feeling of dampness in your armpits.
- What else can you feel in your body? Can you feel your feet on the floor? Can you rub two fingers together with such attention that you can feel your fingertip ridges? What can you hear? Smell? Taste? What’s your tongue doing?
- Once the pattern is interrupted and there is some space created, you get to choose something different. You get to shift from reaction to response.
- Can you have compassion for yourself at this moment? “Oh, now I know what’s happening. I’m not going to die from this. My mind is in the future. My body is in the past. This is happening because I have stuck energy in my body that’s been hit.”
- Can you get curious about what’s happening? “Have I ever actually let myself feel these sensations and my body before or have I just found them overwhelming and tried to avoid them?”
- You can ask: “What is important here? How do I want to feel/act/behave instead?”
- You can take some action. Can you move to a different space? Can you ask for help from someone you trust? You may be able to move your body by physically shaking, dancing, kickboxing, etc. Do something to move that energy that is trying to speak to you.
And if none of that works, what you may be able to do is come back to it and use the process after you are out of the cycle. “What could I have done differently at that moment?”
You can envision yourself going through the process you wish you had been able to stop and use. Noticing, pausing, feeling, and choosing differently instead. This is proven to rewire the neural pathways as if you had been able to make the shift in the moment, much like elite athletes practicing game winning shots in their minds being nearly as effective as actually practicing.
If you take anything away from this article, I want you to remember that you are not a victim to the experience of the anxiety and alarm process. It’s not something that you need to be so scared of and it’s not something you are destined to suffer from forever, especially if you are willing to equip and empower yourself with the tools you need to take your power back.
You can get Dr. Kennedy’s book “AnxietyRx” on Amazon (please leave him a review if you do) or any other book retailer. He was a Canadian physician that has left medicine and now spends his time and energy trying to educate the public and other healthcare professionals about this healing process from anxiety. He suffered with anxiety himself, much like I did, and we’ve both left the traditional medical system in search of ways to better support people with their health and healing that involves more agency and empowerment.
You are not broken and there is nothing wrong with you. You have everything you need to take control of your own health and healing when you are ready and until then, you are doing the best you can with what you know. If you would like personal 1:1 support overcoming anxiety or establishing a mental fitness practice, please reach out to me via my social media channels or website at www.hollymccorriston.com
It is my pleasure to be able to serve the community in this capacity and I always appreciate feedback on what you are finding helpful and what you would like to read more about!
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