Struggling with anxiety and stress? It’s in how you handle the message
Before reading this essay, take three deep breaths.
Take a moment to set your intention for why you have decided to read this essay. Your intention can be anything that feels relevant and right to you in this current moment. Given that you clicked on this essay however, I’d wager that your intention is probably to learn how to reduce the amount of stress in your life. That’s a perfect intention.
I ask you to start with this, because the act of setting an intention is an integral part of getting the most out of mindfulness and living our best lives. Setting an intention is an act that engages our subconscious, which is where our immense inner potential resides.
Our true power lies not in conscious thought and our egoic desires for control, which are rigid and susceptible to shatter during times of intense stress; rather, our true potential lies in our ability to accept what we cannot control in life, and instead to be flexible and adaptable, no matter what.
As you continue reading, keep the word “acceptance” in mind.
And take a moment every so often in the future and think about what intention you might want to set - it just might transform your life, for the better.
Now, then - as the title of this essay claims, we are not in control of time. We can’t add it and give ourselves more time to prepare for some future moment, and we can’t remove it and speed through the challenging parts of our lives.
Although it may be frustrating, the veracity of this reality is not hard for you and I to agree on. This truth is especially frustrating when we are in the grip of anxious stress and wish for nothing else except to be able to either hit the pause button and have all the time in the world to prepare, or hit the fast forward button and be done with the upcoming event already.
So what are we able to control?
What we can do is internalize the fact that, while we can’t pause or remove time, we can remove our anxious, time-related stress.
Despite what our anxious minds or shrewd egos may tell us, every one of us is actually in full control of how much anxious stress we decide to allow to exist in our minds.
If we don’t know how to handle our anxious thoughts, we will begin to hold our breath waiting for some future moment to arrive. In this practice, the stress we experience proliferates like a mental cancer. There’s nothing good that comes from holding your breath. It won’t change how much time is between you and the future moment you’re waiting for, and it won’t help you to become better prepared; holding your breath will only cause you to live a lower quality of life until that moment passes, and even after when you begin holding your breath for some other future moment.
So how can we learn to stop holding our breath and combat the spread of stress that comes from our anxiety about the future?
Let’s begin by thinking about the reason that stress exists in the first place.
Stress is a psychosomatic reaction to the different emotions we feel. It can come from any emotional state, but one of the most common sources of stress in modern society is anxiety, which is an emotion that arises from a mental preoccupation or worry about the future.
A key to removing anxious stress is to realize that anxiety and the stress that attaches to it exist to serve a purpose.
In order to vanquish your enemy, the first step is to respect it.
When an anxious thought arises, its job, like any other thought, is to be noticed. Unlike other thoughts, however, an anxious thought carries a negative charge, or stress.
Our power of control over anxious stress lies in how we decide to handle the anxious thought and its message.
There are several problems that we can create which curb our power of control over anxious stress. These problems arise if we don’t handle the anxious messenger thought properly, and prolonged exposure to stress - not unlike sun rays - is what causes what is at first beneficial, productive stress to be transfigured into harmful, chronic stress.
The best manner in which to react to an anxious messenger thought is to:
Acknowledge receipt of its message, and thank the thought for bringing this message to attention.
Decide how to take action, and then take action.
Send the messenger thought away and refuse to receive the same anxious thought messenger again.
Here are some of the specific problems we can make when dealing with an anxious messenger thought:
Not acknowledging and thanking it.
Not actioning its message.
Not sending it away or receiving an anxious messenger thought again, after we have already acknowledged and sufficiently actioned its message.
Assuming that we can control the outcome of our actions or the situation.
The first problem happens when we don’t respect that an anxious thought has a different charge than a run-of-the-mill or “benign” thought. A benign thought has no charge - in other words, it doesn’t have an emotion attached to it. So, sending away a benign thought doesn’t carry the danger of allowing its negative charge to wreak havoc if we simply send it away as-is.
For instance, a benign thought may be to contemplate what to have for dinner tonight. There’s a message here, but no emotional charge to consider. Even if we send this thought away without thanking it or taking action, it won’t elevate our stress levels.
An anxious thought in the same vein might be to remember that we have an upcoming date and to worry that we won’t get a spot at a good restaurant. This thought is an anxious thought that carries a negative charge or stress with it. If we send away this thought without neutralizing its negative charge, then we allow that negativity to be free to roam about in our mind, and to add its negativity to the overall charge of our mind.
Acknowledging and thanking the anxious thought balances its negative charge (anxiety/worry) out with a positive charge (thankfulness). This allows the thought, once dismissed, to not add negativity into your mental kingdom.
Worse than failing to acknowledge and thank an anxious thought is to strengthen its negative charge, by consciously reacting to its message with angry, sad, or fearful thoughts. Such additional negatively charged thoughts will attach to the anxious thought’s party and begin to form a group, which can eventually become a crowd, which can eventually turn into an all-out riot in your head.
Thanking an anxious thought isn’t guaranteed to remove your stress, though, unless you have addressed its reason for appearing. This is the second problem we can create when mishandling anxious thoughts.
In the above example, addressing the anxious thought’s reason for being might involve picking up the phone and actually making a dinner reservation, or planning to do so later in the day. Once thanked and actioned, the anxious thought can be sent away; you can consciously touch it with your mind and ask it to dissipate because you have addressed its reason for existing.
If we don’t consciously send the thought away, we only allow it to loiter about, where we might confuse it as a new thought and continue paying it attention when there’s nothing more we can do regarding its message.
This might feel more pertinent in another example.
Say, for instance, that you are preparing for an upcoming interview or presentation. Once you have thanked the thought and taken the appropriate time to practice your responses to questions or run through your presentation a few times, the proper move is to send the anxious messenger thought away. Otherwise, you will be fooled into paying it more attention without a new reason to do so, or else you will be susceptible to receiving it again once you have sent it away, which is the third problem.
Once we have acknowledged, thanked, taken action, and sent an anxious thought away, receiving and listening to the same anxious messenger again will do nothing more that is productive for us. This is when we can be led into holding our breath or spiraling into a deepening anxiety that consumes ever-more of our attention, so that we don’t have the mental capacity to receive other thoughts, even if they are positive or interesting ones.
For many people, the most difficult part of the process of removing anxiety and stress is to know what action - or how much actioning - is enough to be sufficiently prepared for whatever it is that we are anxious for and stressed about.
Working with a coach, advisor, friend, or other trusted person can help in this regard, by offering you fresh perspective and helping you to see things from an angle unclouded by the anxiety or stress you are already shrouded by.
Setting an intention to prepare sufficiently, but not too much, is also a great tool in this task, as is practicing mindfulness or meditation, which can help you to clear your own mind’s eye and realize how much preparation is good enough vs overboard.
However you do it, removing stress and anxiety from your life requires you to learn how to prepare for future events in a balanced, non-obsessive way. This relates to the final problem we can make in handling anxious thoughts, which is to try to believe that our efforts today can control what happens to us in the future.
The only thing that we can fully control in life is our own perception, or whether or not we accept what happens in our lives.
Even if we prepared for an interview for 36 hours straight, it wouldn’t guarantee us the job. Even if we made a reservation at a three-star Michelin restaurant, it wouldn’t guarantee our date would go well. Even if we had the ability to pause or stop time, it wouldn’t guarantee we could get rid of our anxiety or stress.
The sinister and subtle illusion that we get caught up in actually believing, however, is not that the 36th hour of preparation will make the difference in controlling the outcome of our job interview, but that the 5th, or the 6th, or the 10th hour will, and if we don’t make that little bit of extra effort, that our failure to control the outcome is because we didn’t do enough. Or not that if this date doesn’t go well that it means we’re unworthy of love, and so we have to do everything possible to make this one date/referendum on our entire love life go well, because our ability to attain everlasting life happiness was within our power, and we failed.
Practicing acceptance of what happens in life is the most fundamental takeaway of mindfulness, and learning to be present in life. Letting go of the belief that we can control the outcome of anything our anxious thoughts point us to address is in the end the final and most important component in removing our anxious stress.
Accepting that we cannot control what happens to us in life is what enables us to be flexible in navigating life, rather than becoming brittle and prone to being snapped in two by the anxiety or other negativity that will arise sooner or later.
Just do the best that you can in life, and then accept what happens.
Before closing, I would be remiss not to call out the fact that there is no separate entity in our minds called the anxious messenger thought, whom we are thanking. Referring to thanking the anxious messenger thought is just a fun, personified way to remind us to be thankful for remembering something upcoming. Being thankful is not the same thing as trying to make one part of us thank the other part of ourselves, which is an impossibility and about which Alan Watts has much to say.
Steps 1 and 2 are important for ensuring that we practice (self)love and (self)acceptance. Skipping these steps can make us feel as though one part of us is the master or enemy of the other part of us. This feeds the illusion that there is an imaginary “self” that is separate from the rest of “us,” and this part must fight tooth and nail to exist and survive as a separate entity from the other part and the world at-large. This leads to depression and more anxiety when our ego instigates a battle of us beating our “selves” up.
Stay tuned for more musings on how to reduce stress or anxiety and how to live mindfully in modern society, and in doing so discover and resonate more happiness, love, peace, energy, and meaning.