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Page 4 of 8
Anxiety is your mental tongue. Its default mode is to search for what may be about to go wrong. It continually, and without your conscious consent, scans your life--yes, even when you are asleep, in dreams and nightmares. It reviews your work, your love, your play--until it finds an imperfection. When it finds one, it worries it. It tries to pull it out from its hiding place, where it is wedged inconspicuously under some rock. It will not let go. If the imperfection is threatening enough, anxiety calls your attention to it by making you uncomfortable. If you do not act, it yells more insistently--disturbing your sleep and your appetite.
You can reduce daily, mild anxiety. You can numb it with alcohol, Valium, or marijuana. You can take the edge off with meditation or progressive relaxation. You can beat it down by becoming more conscious of the automatic thoughts of danger that trigger anxiety and then disputing them effectively.
But do not overlook what your anxiety is trying to do for you. In return for the pain it brings, it prevents larger ordeals by making you aware of their possibility and goading you into planning for and forestalling them. It may even help you avoid them altogether. Think of your anxiety as the "low oil" light flashing on the dashboard of your car. Disconnect it and you will be less distracted and more comfortable for a while. But this may cost you a burned-up engine. Our dysphoria, or bad feeling, should, sonic of the time, be tolerated, attended to, even cherished.
GUIDELINES FOR WHEN TO TRY TO CHANGE ANXIETY
Some of our everyday anxiety, depression, and anger go beyond their useful function. Most adaptive traits fall along a normal spectrum of distribution, and the capacity for internal bad weather for everyone some of the time means that sonic of us may have terrible weather all of the time. In general, when the hurt is pointless and recurrent--when, for example, anxiety insists we formulate a plan but no plan will work--it is time to take action to relieve the hurt. There are three hallmarks indicating that anxiety has become a burden that wants relieving:
First, is it irrational?
We must calibrate our bad weather inside against the real weather outside. Is what you are anxious about out of proportion to the reality of the danger? Here are some examples that may help you answer this question. All of the following are not irrational:
A fire fighter trying to smother a raging oil well burning in Kuwait repeatedly wakes up at four in the morning because of flaming terror dreams.
A mother of three smells perfume on her husband's shirts and, consumed by jealousy, broods about his infidelity, reviewing the list of possible women over and over.
A student who had failed two of his midterm exams finds, as finals approach, that he can't get to sleep for worrying. He has diarrhea most of the time.
The only good thing that can be said about such fears is that they are well-founded.
In contrast, all of the following are irrational, out of proportion to the danger:
An elderly man, having been in a fender bender, broods about travel and will no longer take cars, trains, or airplanes.
An eight-year-old child, his parents having been through an ugly divorce, wets his bed at night. He is haunted with visions of his bedroom ceiling collapsing on him.
A housewife who has an MBA and who accumulated a decade of experience as a financial vice president before her twins were born is sure her job search will be fruitless. She delays preparing her resumes for a month.
The second hallmark of anxiety out of control is paralysis. Anxiety intends action: Plan, rehearse, look into shadows for lurking dangers, change your life. When anxiety becomes strong, it is unproductive; no problem-solving occurs. And when anxiety is extreme, it paralyzes you. Has your anxiety crossed this line? Some examples:
A woman finds herself housebound because she fears that if she goes out, she will be bitten by a cat.
A salesman broods about the next customer hanging up on him and makes no more cold calls.
A writer, afraid of the next rejection slip, stops writing.
The final hallmark is intensity. Is your life dominated by anxiety? Dr. Charles Spielberger, one of the world's foremost testers of emotion, has developed well-validated scales for calibrating how severe anxiety is. To find out how anxious you are, use the self-analysis questionnaire beginning on page 38.
LOWERING YOUR EVERYDAY ANXIETY
Everyday anxiety level is not a category to which psychologists have devoted a great deal of attention. Enough research has been done, however, for me to recommend two techniques that quite reliably lower everyday anxiety levels. Both techniques are cumulative, rather than one-shot fixes. They require 20 to 40 minutes a day of your valuable time.
The first is progressive relaxation, done once or, better, twice a day for at least 10 minutes. In this technique, you tighten and then turn off each of the major muscle groups of your body until you are wholly flaccid. It is not easy to be highly anxious when your body feels like Jell-O. More formally, relaxation engages a response system that competes with anxious arousal.
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