How Can I Conquer Anxiety?

RYAN, INSTAGRAM

~ NAU Athletes Ali Upshaw and Kiera Moore at Pre-Nationals 2024

So many of you have asked the same question. By anxiety we are normally referring to the experience of physical sensations such as a tight chest, stomach, or throat, alongside racing thoughts and fears about the future. The belief underlying these sensations is, something is going to happen that I’m not going to be able to handle.

Anxiety typically arises within meaningful areas of our lives where a result, or the unfolding of circumstances, are unknown. For athletes this can mean a race, or the progression of a season.

Anxiety is your awareness of your vulnerability within this meaningful unknown and your nervous system’s attempt to cope with it.

Personally, the way that I work with anxiety, is to view it as part of me having a reaction as opposed to a state that I have become. I will begin by locating where anxiety lives in my body. For example, is it in my chest, or my throat, or my head? Then, I will describe what I find as, “I am experiencing anxiety in my throat and my thoughts” as opposed to “I am anxious.”  

When we view anxiety as simply a reaction within a part of us, and realize that it is present in some parts of our body but not others, we can also notice that we have a source of awareness outside of the anxiety – an awareness that is not anxious.

The key to working with our inner experience, including anxiety, is to develop this outside awareness. I call this awareness “looking attention.” Looking attention is a capacity that we all have to observe our inner experience without becoming lost in those experiences (when we are lost in our inner experiences I call that, “lost” attention.) Here are some examples to differentiate between the two:

Lost attention: “I have to qualify for Nationals at this meet or all of my work is a waste.”

Looking attention: “My throat is tight and my heart is racing. A part of me is believing that I have to qualify for Nationals at this meet or all of my work is a waste. Is that true?”

The key to working with anxiety is not so much to reduce the anxiety, but to strengthen our capacity for looking attention.

Looking attention contains the following qualities:

Awareness: of what type of attention you are utilizing: lost vs. looking. Lost attention is caught in fear stories about something that happened in the past, or something that you don’t want to happen in the future. Looking attention is awareness of what is happening in the present, including the fact that a part of you feels anxious.

Understanding: Looking attention includes an understanding that anxiety is a natural response of parts of ourselves to the meaningful unknown. It is awareness of your vulnerability and your nervous system’s attempt to protect you.

Acceptance: Looking attention accepts what is real in the moment. When we resist anxious feelings or judge ourselves for having them, these feelings tend to increase. To better accept anxious feelings notice that in this moment you can probably handle them. They are not comfortable, but you are ok.

Compassion: Notice the discomfort and fear that your anxious parts are experiencing. Can you feel compassion for these parts that feel scared?

Curiosity: involves inquiring into the anxious feelings a little more deeply by asking, “what are you believing?” Deeper inquiry allows fears to be heard, which can calm anxiety.

Conviction: Looking attention involves the qualities listed above, as well as the recognition that you are still able to act like the person that I want to be in the presence of uncomfortable emotion. Conviction is the decision to act well no matter what.

Looking attention can take time to develop. Sometimes awareness is the only quality that we can muster at the beginning. But, over time, with effort and experimentation, the other qualities can be grown.

With many repetitions of looking attention, and the gradual expansion of the qualities present within yours, your awareness of your inner experience (including anxiety) becomes stronger and more automatic. Although we are not actively trying to reduce the anxiety by developing looking attention, over time it typically does settle down. After all, when a system becomes aware that is possesses a calm inner source of wisdom and care, it begins to trust that it can handle more circumstances.

The practice of meeting our inner world with looking attention is a performance enhancing skill. For runners, the ability to be aware of and present with uncomfortable inner experience is directly transferrable to one’s capacity to handle exertion pain. Although anxiety feels different than exertion pain, the inner capacity to handle both is the same.

For so many, anxiety feels like an inner demon whose sole purpose is to ruin an experience. But, this demon is grossly misunderstood. An anxious response is evidence of a part of you that is extra awake to the unpredictable nature of life. That part is aware of your vulnerability and cares about your well-being and safety, perhaps more than any other being. It is showing up to protect you in the only way that it knows how.

There is a myth which explains that when we love our demon (our anxiety, and any other inner experience), it becomes our “daimon,” which translates to “genius” or “gift.” With all the care and energy that an anxious response contains, who might your anxious parts become if you meet them with love, with the qualities of looking attention, over and over, over time?

“The only power that can effect transformations of astonishing order is love. It remained for the twentieth century to discover that locked within the atom is the energy of the sun itself. For this energy to be released, however, the atom must be bombarded from without. And so too, locked in every human being is a store of love and it too can be activated only through bombardment, in its case love’s bombardment.”

~Houston Smith