Anxiety requires a multi-pronged approach to loosen its grip. It is both physical and mental, and tackling both are equally important. This post focuses on the mental, and will discuss a few coping strategies. I’m also posting another one alongside it, which focuses on the physical. I’ll be fleshing out the coping strategies over coming posts.

 

Back around 500 BC, Sun Tzu, a Chinese general, wrote The Art of War. The book spans 13 chapters, each focusing on the psychological approaches one should utilise at different parts of a battle: planning, overall strategy, tactics in the battle itself, and so forth. However, Sun Tzu’s strategies can not only be applied actual military battles, but conflict of any kind. Hence why, two and a half millennia later, the book still remains wildly popular with a diverse range of society, ranging from modern militaries to Rage Against the Machine to the coke-addled sociopathic suited human cancers occupying the world’s banking system.

Of Sun Tzu’s various wisdoms, perhaps the most famous is “know your enemy”, or expanded:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

Typically, I don’t like to describe anxiety as the enemy, or say that I’m battling it, for reasons I’ll make apparent. Yet, for the purpose of this post, let’s treat it as such. So, if we were to approach the problem like Sun Tzu, the most important thing we can do – before anything else – is understand anxiety.

Anxiety is both physical and mental. So to treat it, you have to approach both the physical and the mental aspects at the same time. Without doing anything to reduce the physical stress, your mind will have too much to focus on to apply any real effort to mental unwinding – you’ll just be caught spending your time running between spinning plates. But conversely, if you just ignore the mess in your mind, nothing gets resolved.

As I spoke about in the accompanying post, the body creates cortisol when stressed to help you cope – it can give you increased focus, help you push yourself further, increase your reflexes, all of which can be pretty handy when it comes to jumping out of the way of a car or something similar. With anxiety, because you are stressed all the time, the tap is left on.

The physical symptoms are the result of your body getting burned out from being alert at all times. In turn, you feel burned out, which only feeds your anxiety. As you’ll see, anxiety loves a good circle.

The cortisol itself is produced as part of your body’s fight or flight reaction. Or, more accurately, your fight, flight, or freeze reaction. Many people don’t realise there’s this third option, although a massive chunk of us still do it. When people get taken out of their comfort zone in an emergency, many will freeze. Apparently, playing dead served us well during our evolution.

This whole process is controlled by a part of the brain called the amygdala. This part of the brain is hardwired to the rest of your body – it can react faster than you can think. Whenever you see something coming out of the corner of your eye and duck before you even realise that some mad bastard bird is hurtling towards your face, that’s your amygdala. It identifies threats without consulting you, and takes action before you get a say in the matter. Without it, you’d probably already be dead.

Consequently, the amygdala is a jittery bugger at the best of times. It also has its own memory banks, separate from your own conscious self. Phobias are a good example of this. Rationally, I could absolutely devastate a wasp. It might have a stinger, but I’m a man. A 6’6 man with a variety of swatting tools at arm’s reach. My feet should be tried for war crimes against snails*. I have hands with a surface area that your average fly would find unfathomably terrifying in both scale and raw destructive power. I am the insect world’s Cthulhu.

Yet, all it takes is one wasp to come within a three-metre radius of me, and I completely lose my shit. This is down to my amygdala training itself to fear wasps, and will trigger when any wasp – or any flying insect if it is having a bad day – decides to say hi.

This is why you can panic over seemingly nothing. Think of it like going out with a sober friend while you get trashed. You do all sorts of crazy shit, like stripping off and running through Burger King while telling all the punters to flip your meat. You, of course, conveniently forget all this. Yet, the next day, you walk past Burger King with your friend. Your friend looks concerned, but rather than reminding you of the night before, they just start smacking you with a stick. A big, electrified stick coated in adrenaline. This is your amygdala in action.

Of course, anxiety also exists in the conscious mind, and often works in tandem with the amygdala, in a conversation that I think goes something like this:

“Hey, Amygdala. I’m not liking the situation we’re in. What do you think we should do?”

“I THINK WE SHOULD FREAK THE FUCK OUT!!!”

“Done. I’ll get the oxygen tank, you get the cortisol.”

When combined, the panic can be extremely powerful. You are scared in your conscious mind, and your amygdala is screaming fight, flight, or freeze. Yet, the situation can be as simple as being at work, and punching your boss before legging it out of the office isn’t an option. The fear in your mind battles the rational, and the product is more stress, more cortisol, and more searing holes in your brain where logical reasoning should exist.

The main difference the two processing centres is that in the conscious mind, you are dealing with concepts you can put your finger on. Speaking in front of crowd. Saying the wrong thing in a social setting. Feeling like you are about to drop dead.

All these thoughts work on the same circular principle: a circle of fear. You have triggers – a memory, a sensation, a situation. Your brain jumps to some pre-assumed conclusion. You react in a certain way.

Examples:

I can’t deal with everything. I’m worthless. I’m going to drink.

I can’t think of what to say. No one wants me here. I’m never going to go out.

I’ve been worrying about this lump. I’m obviously about to die. Better have a panic attack.

There can be rational thoughts and fears mixed up here, but you aren’t processing them rationally. Instead, you are just pushing them through the circle of fear. You are allowing past experiences and memories to cloud your ability to find the real truth of the present. Rather than alter your thinking, you are instead re-treading old ground, stomping your way through familiar pathways of fear burned into your brain.

At your core, you are simply reacting to what you see as a truth about yourself. As I spoke about before, deep down, I have a feeling that I’m entirely worthless to anyone, and have allowed my thoughts, feelings, actions, and reactions to be controlled by this concept of myself for the past thirty years.

I’ve sought evidence to support that claim, did little to challenge or overcome it, and dismissed anything to the contrary.

I’m now in the process of overturning all of that. I now know my enemy. It amounts to little more than a simple ingrained thought, and various vicious circles of mental trickery I’ve built to enforce it, with a little help from a meth-addicted crackhead part of my brain that freaks out over things with wings.

Understanding all of this has been a major coping strategy for me. Doing the research into anxiety helps normalise it, rationalise it, and takes away its power. Hit the books, download the podcasts, talk to others about their experience with it. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to apply it.

Talking in of itself is critical. One of the reasons I have this blog is so I can order my thoughts on anxiety, and put a narrative to my experience of it. I can look back over four months of work, and see the progress I’ve made. But it also allows me to be open about it. It shows me that I’m not alone in this.

It works both ways. I’ve had many people get in touch and say this blog has helped them better understand their own anxiety, which is fantastic. But it’s also shown me how other people comprehend it, and that dialogue has shown me ways of thinking about anxiety and life in general that I’d previously not even thought of.

An example of this came the other day while I was doing Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). I’m currently at week 8 of a 12-week course on it, and have had to change therapists as my first one is off on maternity leave.

I was discussing worthlessness with the new guy, who got me to describe what attributes a worthwhile human being would have. It’s a genuinely tricky question to answer:

“A sense of conviction, the ability to get things done, be productive, to stick to their moral code…” I blurted out.

“You realise that you just described Joseph Stalin, don’t you?”

My sense of worthlessness was shattered. How can I be worthless when what it means to have worth is, in itself, indefinable, ineffable, and entirely subjective?

CBT has delivered a number of similar realisations, and I’d highly encourage people to give it a go. The way it works is to help you identify mental knots in your cognitive thought process and how they affect your behaviours as your behaviours can circle back round into the thought process. Identify the knots, untie them, and then change your approach so you don’t tie them again. It is talking the talk, then walking the walk.

I’ve also found that CBT has a strong synergy with meditation. When you meditate, the goal is to essentially just focus on one thing. This might be your breath, it might be scanning through your body, it can be on a mantra, on a noises surrounding you. It can even be on coffee.

One mindfulness trick is all about coffee. Most of the time, we chug the stuff back while on the move, and pay no attention to it whatsoever. I want you to really taste it. So, next time you order a cappuccino or make a coffee at home, give the experience 100% of your effort. Take note of your surroundings. Listen to it brew. Watch the steam as it pours. Smell it as the impending caffeine hits your nostrils. Sip slowly, and spend time identifying exactly what you taste. You will be in awe at what happens when you pay attention.

Of course, your mind will wander while doing it. This happens all the time when you meditate. You are trying to achieve complete stillness of the mind, but this is next to impossible. Therein lies the fun.

What you are training your brain to do is to notice thoughts as they happen, to not react to them, and to be able to let them go. It’s the gym for your brain. You are building a muscle that can keep you in the present, identifying thoughts as they come in, and happily give them the finger as they drift back off into the cerebral oblivion of your subconscious.

Combine that with CBT, and what you’ve got is a deeper understanding of yourself and the sort of bullshit your idiot brain likes to throw at you, and an effective countermeasure to it. It’s the understanding, the strategy, the tactics, and the army all wrapped up. It’s about as Sun Tzu as it can get.

But here’s why it’s not a battle, and anxiety isn’t the enemy. In knowing anxiety, you come to know yourself. You see yourself from different perspectives, and gain a greater understanding of yourself. What you fear. Why you act the way you do. You are the enemy of which Tzu spoke of. Knowing the enemy is knowing yourself.

But in that knowledge of yourself, you find peace. You aren’t your own enemy. In understanding, you realise that there’s no reason to fight yourself. You are just a human being just like the rest of us, with all the faults any of us have, with a silly human brain that’s just doing its best to keep you away from fear, harm, and wasps.

 

*To any snails reading this, I am so, so sorry. Know that I never meant to hurt a single one of you. Slugs, on the other hand, can fuck right off.