Managing Anxiety By Interrupting The Loop

Are you finding yourself more irritable than you want to be? Do you sometimes get tired of not being able to relax and enjoy more of your moments?

It's Anxiety Week on the Last 8% Morning podcast, and we've been building tools to manage anxiety so that we can enjoy more of our moments, and manage anxiety every day and in our more difficult Last 8% situations.

In order to conquer anxiety, we first need to learn how our mind works. We need to become students of human behavior, starting with ourselves.

As we bring curiosity to the mechanisms of our brains, we start to see these processes more intimately and then take necessary steps to change them.

Today, I want to first begin with a simple yet incredibly important thing I have learned over the years: We push things away we do not like. We are attracted to things we do like.

Seems pretty obvious, right? But it is important. We are taught from an early age to change our situation if we are not comfortable:

If we are too cold, turn up the furnace.

If we are too warm, turn on the air conditioning.

If we are hungry, eat.

Acting on discomfort is not the end of the world in and of itself.

Acting on discomfort does become a problem when it turns into habit -- where we have to change our circumstances whenever we are uncomfortable.

Why? Because then we end up in a constant cycle of revision, trying to get things just right. But the problem is that things are very seldom just right.

Sometimes they are not very comfortable at all — and sometimes they are just neutral.

And, what do we do? We try to make our surroundings more comfortable or we try to change them so they feel more interesting. I'm sure you've noticed how many people who stop at traffic lights immediately look at their phones. For many, neutral situations feel insufferable. If you are one of these people, just know you have lots of company including me.

So why do I make this point?

When it comes to the strong physical sensations, emotions or thoughts we experience with anxiety, we may also react to them in habit. We don’t want to feel them, and we try to push them away.

When this happens internally — we can end up in the loop I talked about in the first podcast of Anxiety Week.

We need to find a way to interrupt the loop. We need to learn to be in wiser relationship with things that don’t feel good. How do we do that and where do we start?

We fist need to understand our triggers, and these can come from both inside and outside:

• External — a person, or a situation or being in a certain environment.
• Internal — thoughts about a future event or thoughts about something we haven’t finished, or body sensations, or emotions.

Think about it for yourself — what are your triggers? Where do your triggers most show up in your body? Do you feel a stomachache, or a headache?

Bring curiosity to these triggers without trying to change them. Think about them in terms of two barometers: pleasant and unpleasant, or calm and not calm.

What we want to do is welcome these responses, and befriend them. By bringing a non-judgmental awareness to the area, we start the process of pattern interruption. We interrupt the loop from continuing to spin around and around, causing even more anxiety.

The funny part is that if you do this a number of times, you start to see that you actually don’t need to do anything to break the loop. Because what keeps the loop going is when we are on auto pilot and when we habitually react to each step of the loop, from the sensations we feel, the emotions our brain use to label and make its prediction to the thoughts we experience in the VOH.

By simply bringing awareness and befriending the sensations we are experiencing we stop reacting and we stop trying to ‘get away’ from the experience. We start to see the sensations for what they are: just sensations. When we do this, we can interrupt the loop.

This is why we practice mindfulness every day — to be with ever more uncomfortable sensations or experiences without habitually reacting to them.

The more you practice this, the more you see how the mind works and the more you see the loop being interrupted. And the more confident you feel to be in Last 8% situations, those difficult situations that can cause us anxiety, or make us avoid altogether or make a mess of.

Now, at this stage, we might begin to see that we are not the anxiety we are experiencing. For so many people with anxiety unaware of this loop, it's hard to see the difference between themselves and the anxiety. They think they are one and the same. They don’t see that anxiety is a process that is happening to them versus it being who they are.

Mindfulness breaks this loop and allows them to dis-identify with it.

What does dis-identify mean? It just means that we start to that we see that we are not the anxiety. If we can see the process and identify just a little less with it, all of a sudden the anxiety loses it hold on us.

We go from being anxious to just feeling some physical sensations, some emotions, some thoughts.

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