Anxiety is an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes like increased blood pressure.
That’s the American Psychological Association’s definition. It’s serviceable, I guess.
For too many people, when they experience anxiety, it feels much more visceral, distracting, and overall much more acute than the official definition.
Like a heart pang of grief supercharged by a sense of helplessness and dread. Like the flock of butterflies you might feel before a big job interview or a difficult musical performance, except that the interview never comes, and you don’t actually walk on stage.
Perhaps dread is the best synonym for it.
Dull (but somehow shiny) objectless dread. It can wake you up at 5AM with a cortisol dump. You toss and turn and pretend any second now it’s going to get better. We’ve all been there.
One wonders if anxiety is a thought or a feeling. Perhaps the line betwixt them is too blurry to separate them.
In her excellent book Your Thoughts are Killing You: Take Control of Your Mind and Close the Door to Those Negative, Depressing, Fearful, Worrisome Thoughts Forever (how’s that for a title?), Marybeth Wuenschel drives the point home that our thoughts have only the hold on us that we give them. We can take them or leave then. Too often, thoughts arrive in our mind and we let them run riot. They get a foothold, or, in her term, a stronghold over our whole mindset.
I suspect emotions arrive in our hearts the way thoughts do in our minds (and of course emotions because we’re body-soul composites) they can elicit a bodily response. You can think of your toddler falling through a bridge railing, or imagine a sexual encounter, or you remember that time you fell face first into the lake on your first waterskiing attempt. Our bodies follow suit with an increased heart rate, a spike in blood pressure, sweaty palms, and so on. Our minds have an observable governing effect on our bodies.
This, in fact, is the basis for the Placebo Effect. Most people downplay the Placebo Effect, identifying it with something phony or “not real.” But hold on. Placebos actually WORK because our minds assigns a reality to, say the sugar pill we popped that shouldn’t work at all. Yet it does.
This means we can—at an indispensable minimum—harness the action of the Placebo Effect for our benefit by refusing to be mastered by thoughts and feelings of anxiety. We can choose to work ourselves down instead or working ourselves up.
Dr. Claire Weekes, MD, was an Australian physician who specialized in helping anxious people overcome their malady. Her classic text Hope and Help for Your Nerves: End Anxiety Now walks through her four-step remedy for severe anxiety (face it, accept, float through it, and let time pass). But what if just reading about anxiety makes you more anxious?
For Catholics, there is an immediate cure: make an act of trustful surrender to divine Providence.
It’s all found in the remarkable (short) book by Trustful Surrender to Divine Providence: The Secret of Peace and Happiness by Father Jean Baptiste Saint-Jure and St. Claude de la Colombiere.
There is no single “gist” in this small masterpiece, but there is a running theme: every instant, every event, every experience (whether of painful or pleasant) is willed by God for your great good. There are no surprises to God. He knows you’re suffering from anxiety, and He has allowed whatever version (I’d say flavor but glibness doesn’t help) for a powerful purpose you almost certainly can’t see when you’re in the midst of it.
God is in control, and God loves us more than we can ask or imagine. It’s hardly a shock to see that anxiety fits in with the traditional phrase “this vale of tears.”
The key: if you picture yourself as the protagonist of the story known as your life, you can know with moral certainty that the piercing moments of anxiety—especially the moments that seem to whisper “this will never get better” (a favored tactic of the evil spirit)—are only a passing chapter in much larger story.
Joseph Campbell (1904-1987) despite the syncretistic errors that came with his leaving the Catholic Church in his 20s, captured the imagination of generations of screenwriters and other story tellers with his work on mythology and story structure. (His most famous student is Hollywood script doctor Christopher Vogler).
For Vogler/Campbell, the heart of great stories that strum a universal chord all over the world, is the Hero’s Journey. You are the Hero. And every Hero has to undergo a kind of trial, or death, whether actual or symbolic. This is the set up for the big happy finish—the unexpected yet richly satisfying resurrection. Jesus said “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24).
Anxiety is a kind of molasses-in-January-slow death. The main point is, though, it’s temporary. You are free to pay it no heed. What is more, it’s a great idea to get out of your head the moment the slithering, suffocating spirit of anxiety slips past your defenses.
Here are some instantly effective ways of pushing back against encroaching feelings of anxiety:
- Drop down and do as many pushups as you can, even if it’s one or two. Get out of your head. If you’re a little more ambitious, take the Bring Sally Up Push Up Challenge. You’re welcome.
- Take your dog, or just yourself, for 20-minute stern walk, even better if you make it a ruck (throw some text books into a backpack and start marching)
- Talk to someone about it, as opposed to playing the Lone Ranger suffering in noble silence
- Repeat the mantra “Simple and Easy” in your mind over and over, the goal being to cut the negative feedback loop and that helps anxiety stick around longer
- Pray the sinner’s prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”
- Pray the Rosary, with the sure ancd certain knowledge that the events of our Lord’s life and of His Mother are relatable to what you’re going through. Jesus sweated drops of blood in the Garden. He is the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53, and well acquainted with grief. His Mother’s Immaculate Heart was pierced through with the sword of sorrow. These two, the God Man and the Woman who gave Him flesh, are very close to us in our sufferings.
- Write out a To Do list of things that, well, have to get done. Just the act of externalizing the things that command your attention, and tackling them by putting them down on paper can deliver an immediate sense of relief
- Choose pronoia (the opposite of paranoia), the belief that the universe has been designed to be on your side, to favor conditions that help you
- Finally, remember that whatever games the devil can play, he’s been definitively and forever defeated by our Lord Jesus Christ through His bitter passion, which He underwent freely for us. Therefore, since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise also partook of the same, so that through death He might destroy the one who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who through fear of death were subject to slavery all their lives” (Hebrews 2:14-15).
God loves you and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Check out the True North Community if you enjoy growing in faith and reason. And defeating irritants like anxiety at patrickcoffin.media.
