Anxiety Comes In Many Colors

Anxiety is an excess of future

I don't know a single person today, in any context, who doesn't mention something about anxiety at some point in a conversation. It's sadly normal in this fast-paced, ruthless modern world.

Professionally, I dare suggest that those who tend to experience the most noticeable and prolonged states of anxiety are the ones responsible for planning, strategizing, setting objectives, and managing people (with all their emotions, light, and shadow).

I also find it curious that a story framed by anxiety often starts with the same question that brings cinematic stories and innovative ideas to life: "What if...?" which, as I'll comment on later, implies a strong burden of future.

In the organizational context, anxiety is the coffee you drink with your fears and failures, in the space between what was planned and what is supposed to be achieved.

What is anxiety?

It's not stress, although they are very similar.

Stress is an immediate, physical, biochemical reaction to a stimulus that poses a danger. In just and wise proportions, stress can enrich learning of any kind. A healthy dose of cortisol makes us more alert, more focused, and even more creative (depending on our personality tendency).

However, when stress becomes a habit and the cortisol tap remains open, it turns into anxiety. Anxiety is a very complex emotion that feeds on simpler emotions (I try to avoid using Ekman's concept of basic emotions) like fear, anger, joy, sadness, etc. Moreover, anxiety is "cooked" with a strong dose of thought and future vision. Yes, future vision: for instance, when we face a danger like an earthquake, we feel stress, but when we spend several days thinking about what could happen if an earthquake strikes next week and we're on the 30th floor of a building, that’s anxiety.

Just like in the earthquake example, anxiety is the projection of possible future situations that could trigger the activation of simpler emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant.

We can feel anxiety visualizing the happy moment of a wedding, a graduation, or a romantic encounter; or the anxiety of feeling very sad and alone; or the anxiety of a difficult conversation we’ll have at work; in any case, anxiety is an excess of future fed by a particular emotional state.

I don't want more anxiety, I want to be happy

Even the character JOY in "Inside Out" experiences high levels of anxiety. With excess of future, visualizing that perfect scenario for Riley, she would enter states of anxiety that motivated her to seek paths, options, get up, change strategy, etc. Joy (as an emotion) alone is not enough to achieve, it’s not enough to change your world. You will always need a bit of future, a bit of healthy-anxiety to imagine the world you want, the job you want, the partner you want, or the doctoral thesis you want.

I'm convinced that understanding anxiety as a "visor" of future scenarios greatly facilitates emotional self-management. For me, understanding the cause of much of my emotional stress has helped in ways previously unimaginable, allowing me to give each emotion its place in my internal conversation. Thanks to this way of accepting anxiety, I went from insomnia to waking up in the morning without an alarm and feeling recharged. Thanks to my anxiety and the intense work I do every day to understand myself as a human being, I have allowed myself to be part of four startups; compose, sing, and record my music with my own Salsa band; believe that I'm capable of running a marathon someday; and manage the immense work of doctoral research in psychology.

Everything you have, everything you feel, exists for a reason. Use it, take advantage of it.

Anxiety comes in blue, red, green, yellow...

Anxiety as an emotion doesn't exist on its own: it needs a base emotion, simple or non-complex. I invite you to do the exercise when you feel it and ask yourself how you think you would feel if that future scenario, fatal or spectacular, became a reality.

So, you can feel anxiety and happiness; anxiety and guilt; anxiety and sadness; and other combinations you can think of. Always, beneath the anxiety, there's an emotion waiting to be validated, and in that sense, anxiety isn't "cured" by "calming down." No. Anxiety as such isn't "cured," but rather given its place and a job to do.

Emotions aren't created to last long in our bodies, and anxiety is also an attempt (not very useful, really) to keep an emotional state active for long periods, like when you think about a problem over and over again.

Emotions work like energy in the world of physics: they are neither created nor destroyed, but transformed. The great "why" of validating an emotion is to give way to another and then another and another, to move forward in the human experience of your day-to-day.

And if all emotions are susceptible to being "sweetened" with anxiety... how can we take advantage of this common component to manage our emotions? By managing your future scenarios consciously, as taught by Dr. Joe Dispenza in his publications: visualizing scenarios that are coherent with the emotion you decide to install in my mind and body. This way you move from "future vision" to "strategic foresight".

Anxiety comes in many colors, and with all of them, we can interestingly and beautifully color our life experiences, as long as we take control of the future scenarios we want for our lives.

May your excess of future have all the colors you like