Being Curious about Anxiety

Anxiety is both a universal and lonely experience — everybody feels it, and everybody feels alone in it. One of the first steps in learning to manage our anxiety is to share the fearful thoughts we have with someone who has compassion for us.

We can learn to manage scary thoughts by first figuring out the thought itself. Often we have more of an “anxiety experience” in our mind and body, and we need to figure out the words we’re hearing (thoughts), what we feel in our body, and how it’s fit into the story of our past experiences.

I find that working to become aware of my thoughts, and to identify patterns and beliefs can be a good first step.

For example — I realized recently that I get anxious in my stomach when I’m driving down a specific street in Long Beach, CA (it’s the Wardlow St. and Long Beach Blvd intersection). One more, I was driving, and felt that familiar drop in my stomach. I asked myself what is HAPPENING?? Why do I feel this way on this street? I got curious about my brain, body, and how they’re relating to time.

I remembered times when I was on a difficult phone call, or fighting with a family member, and feeling big feelings while driving down Wardlow. Once I let my memory speak to my experience, the anxious feelings and thoughts began to make sense for me. I realized that I felt a heavy feeling of rejection during my drives. Then as I continued to drive on Wardlow, my body would remind me of the feeling. The more the story added up, the less anxious I felt. This awareness gave me a sense of peace.

Awareness means that we try to move from anxious to curious — a decision that immediately shifts us from feeling out of control to feeling a patient authority over our mind and body.

This kind of emotional work can be done alone (through focus, journaling, talking out loud — all of which I consider prayer experiences when I remember God is listening to every fear I have), or with friends who are open to our processing. Groups can be a wonderful support during this process too — whether a therapy group or 12 step, or church community group.

Whichever way you feel best processing thoughts and emotion, I encourage you to make this a normal part of your therapy work.