What is Your Anxiety Telling You? [Transcript]
Anxiety can be an uncomfortable feeling, but it can also be confusing because you don’t always know what’s wrong. Here are four easy steps you can use to understand what is going on beneath your anxiety and what your anxiety is trying to tell you.
Notice Your Anxiety
The first step is just to notice that you are anxious. You might have some cues that you can look to that will let you know that what you are experiencing is anxiety. These cues could be physical, like sweating under your arms or in the palms of your hands. The thoughts you are having could be a cue too, like if you find that you are worrying a lot about many different things. If you are able to establish with yourself that what you’re experiencing is anxiety, then that’s the first step towards managing that anxiety.
Figure Out the Underlying Emotion
The second step is to figure out if there’s an emotion beneath your anxiety. You can simply ask yourself if you’re experiencing any of the basic core emotions (fear, sadness, anger, disgust, joy, or excitement). Ask yourself, “am I experiencing fear? Am I experiencing sadness?” and so on. Go through the emotions and see if any of them are something you identify with.
Feel the Feeling
Once you’ve identified an underlying emotion, the next step is to feel the feeling. To do this, drop your awareness down into your body and see if there are any physical sensations that accompany the emotion. For example, if you are experiencing sadness, you might feel a tightness in your chest or an urge to cry. If you’re experiencing anger, you might have an energized feeling in your temples. Give a lot of space to the feeling and see how it is to let the physical sensations exist.
Get Curious About the Emotion
See if the emotion is asking you to say or do something. Do you have an urge to act or to speak up? See if you can understand what the emotion wants. Perhaps you want to sooth yourself by taking a bath or seek social support by calling a friend. Many times, the urges that we have around emotions are perfectly reasonable and it will help to follow them. Other times they may not be reasonable: perhaps it is not the time or place to act of the emotional urge, or perhaps it just wouldn’t be helpful. If that’s the case, let yourself sit with that feeling a little bit longer and, like a wave, it will probably pass.
These are four steps you can use to understand what your anxiety is trying to tell you: notice you’re anxious, see if you identify with an emotion, feel the feeling, and get curious about that emotion. If you’re interested in learning more about this way of managing anxiety, I recommend reading It’s Not Always Depression by Hilary Jacobs Hendel.
How do you understand respond to your anxiety in helpful ways? Join the conversation in the comments below.
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3 comments
I love how you make anxiety seem more relatable and less scary. I personally always try to be curious about it to look for what it’s trying to tell me. I look at anxiety as a reaction to something deeper.
This is such a great video blog, Weston! I really like the idea of giving ourselves permission to feel the anxiety, as I believe that we often suffer from the things we do not want to feel or accept. I understand and respond to my anxiety by doing what you suggested in step four, exploring my anxiety from a place of curiosity. This process usually allows me to have clarity on my emotions which in turns gives me more insight to what my anxiety is about. This is so helpful, thanks!
This is a great bog, Weston! I think it’s such a powerful thing to simply take the time to notice and acknowledge our anxiety. That in itself can help it shift sometimes. I particularly like your suggestion to get curious about what is under the anxiety. Thanks for creating this great resource.