I want to share a confusing aspect of contending with anxiety. I inhabit a body that is prone to overactivation; every interaction, experience, and stimuli impacts my physiology. And when nothing external has changed? Still my heart races and my stomach clenches. Our stress response is supposed to adaptively react to unsafe circumstances. Mine seems to think that disagreements with friends are on par with natural disasters.
This torrent of anxiety occupies my being down to my bones. It's as if I can feel the cortisol and adrenaline instigating mayhem through my bloodstream. And because humans are inherently driven to seek explanations for our circumstances, my mind gets busy determining what the hell is going on. Which would be great, except that our brains are imperfectly illogical and anxiety does not always have a "why". As a result, this abundance of negative energy becomes displaced onto a particular aspect of my life. This satisfies my reason- driven mind, but creates problems where their previously were none. That is NOT my kind of sorcery.
I'll share a personal example. My eating disorder came about because I displaced anxiety onto my body. We are our own harshest critics- it was too easy to let myself believe that I was anxious because I was ugly. As twisted as it sounds, it helped to have the awful feeling make sense. If there was a reason for it then I could work to combat it, and that I did. I thought that restricting calories and excessive exercise- things that would shrink my frame- would lead to beauty and then happiness. How wrong I was. There was never anything wrong with this vessel I inhabit, but the insidiousness of anxiety drove me to harm it anyway.
It is counterintuitive to accept that this all- consuming shit storm can happen for no reason at all. Or that there are triggers, but they need not affect me in such extreme ways. My current approach to anxiety is this. When I feel it creeping in, I pause. I breath. I take a moment to build separation between myself and this feeling. While I can't always breath it away, I can at least stop it from attaching to my thoughts. It remains an awful state of being, but lacks the power to affect my relationships, behavior, or self love. Anxiety takes enough from me; I stand in passionate protection of the rest.
