By Andrea Hunsaker
“One is a great deal less anxious if one feels perfectly free to be anxious
”
The Biodome Experiment
A scientist once wondered what would happen if we could live in a perfect environment. So they built a huge glass dome in the desert, ideal for life, with purified air and water, just the right amount of sunlight, fertile soil—everything a human and plant would need to thrive. For months at a time, people lived inside the biodome. It seemed to be going great until, after the trees reached a certain height, they inexplicably fell over. The scientists discovered that the trees needed strong wind in order for the heartwood to become sturdy and the root system to grow deep enough to support a healthy tree. The experiment was concluded early (Cohen & Tilman, 1996; Walford, 2002).
Changing Your Relationship With Anxiety
Chronic stress, anxiety, burnout—these have been buzzwords the past couple years and much of the advice out there focuses on how to get rid of them. Personally, the past few years of grad school and starting a counseling career on top of the rest of my life have felt like a hurricane, and I’d like nothing more than to go find the biodome and move in so this constant nervousness I carry around in my stomach will go away. (The dome’s got to still be out there somewhere; if anyone stumbles across it, please send the GPS coordinates). I’ve tried avoiding, resisting, escaping, distracting, procrastinating—these don’t work for long, and often make it worse. And now I’m down to the last resort, this radical approach of not trying to make it go away—befriending the anxiety.
Dennis Merritt Jones said it beautifully: “Watch how a tree bends and sways gracefully when the wind blows against it. It does not stand rigid, resisting the flow of energy. It does not push back. The tree accepts the strong wind as a blessing that helps it grow.”
The truth is that stress itself isn’t harmful—it’s the belief that stress is bad for you. One study found that people had a 43% increased risk of dying if they experienced a lot of stress and believed it was harmful. On the flip side, those who reported having stress but not viewing it as harmful were the least likely to die. The increased risk of death was not from the stress, but the belief that it was bad (Keller et al., 2012). Let that sink in. (Now are you stressed about your opinion of stress?) And that’s the tricky part—how can a person change their perception that an uncomfortable nervousness and a racing heart and mind is a good—or at least neutral—thing?
Approaching Anxiety With Non-Judgemental Mindfulness
Fear is a natural and useful human emotion, yet we are socialized to feel flawed and weak if we experience it. We criticize ourselves when we feel fear and anxiety, and it’s the criticism, not the fear, that hurts us. As I walk through the grocery store trying to fill my cart with a balance of low maintenance and healthy and notice my heart racing as my mind ruminates on the undone, it’s not the increased heart rate that bothers me (my heart beats fast when I’m out for a run, dancing with abandon, or when my husband smiles at me), it’s my self judgements. “What’s wrong with me? I shouldn’t be like this. I don’t want to feel this way.” When I become mindful of the physical sensations of anxiety without judgment, I can welcome them, become curious about what’s happening in my body and mind, and accept my experience as part of a full life. Try experimenting with words or phrases like, “Welcome. Yes. This belongs. May I accept all my experience. And.”
The word “And” reminds me that I can do what I value and feel anxiety. Sometimes we have to be willing to feel discomfort if it means moving toward a future that we want. One of the tolls of anxiety is that it keeps us from living a full life as we try to avoid those situations that provoke it. For example, this post is 2 months late. I’ve been avoiding writing it because, what if it’s bad? I was thinking, “I want to write a blog post but I’m too anxious about it.” Ah, the irony—too anxious to write a post about anxiety. However, I value spreading this knowledge so I breathed acceptance and compassion into my discomfort and told myself, “I want to write a blog post and I’m anxious about it.” And here we are.
A lot of evidence supports meditation for reducing stress and anxiety (Goyal et al., 2014) . . . which is a bummer because I’m accepting my anxiety now and don’t mind if it hangs around or whatever. But here’s a meditation anyway by Dr. Warren for accepting stressful emotions. I love this one and listen to it often:
Finally, below are a couple resources with mindful exercises for anxiety. Again, not to make you go away, Anxiety. Feel free to put your feet up, we’re BFFs now.
To reduce that extra layer of my resistance toward my guest, some mindfulness exercises: https://www.migrantclinician.org/files/_pdfs/9%20mindfulness%20exercises%20for%20anxiety.pdf
And a book:
The Mindful Way Through Anxiety, by Susan Orsillo and Lizabeth Roemer
May we gracefully bend with the wild wind of our stressors and grow to consider it a friend.
“Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.”
REFERENCES
Cohen, J. E., & Tilman, D. (1996). Biosphere 2 and biodiversity: The lessons so far. Science, 274(5290), 1150–1151. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.274.5290.1150
Goyal, M., Singh, S., Sibinga, E. M. S., Gould, N. F., Rowland-Seymour, A., Sharma, R., Berger, Z., Sleicher, D., Maron, D. D., Shihab, H. M., Ranasinghe, P. D., Linn, S., Saha, S., Bass, E. B., & Haythornthwaite, J. A. (2014). Meditation programs for psychological stress and well-being: A systematic review and meta-analysis. JAMA Intern Med., 174(3), 357–368. https://doi.org/10.1001/jamainternmed.2013.13018
Keller, A., Litzelman, K., Wisk, L. E., Maddox, T., Cheng, E. R., Creswell, P. D., & Witt, W. P. (2012). Does the perception that stress affects health matter? The association with health and mortality. Health Psychology, 31(5), 677–684. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0026743
Walford, R. L. (2002). Biosphere 2 as voyage of discovery: The serendipity from inside. BioScience, 52(3), 259–263.