Stress less from the inside out

I have been reading various articles on dealing with anxiety; All well intentioned, and providing good advice, but is it the right advice?

Simply saying to not worry and be more content does little to help me. I know that’s what I need to do. It just makes me all the more frustrated when I can’t. I think, if I could just stop obsessing about this, maybe I wouldn’t be so anxious. I need to know how to stop.

Yes, taking breaks and getting exercise are good things, and may even help relieve some of your stress. I’m certainly not disputing that. But those are external changes that may indeed help with the problem, but won’t cure it.

What I advocate is an internal change, in breathing, in thought patterns. This might seem a little harder to manage. The first, in fact, was huge for me. So many people breath shallow breaths all day, which activates the “panic” response in our brain stem. This, in turn, releases the stress response, fight, flight, or freeze.

I am absolutely convinced that this is what is wrong with our world. We are all stressed out reptiles, fighting, fleeing, and freezing unnecessarily, when we could be
handling our problems in a much more sane, humane way. Overly simplistic? Perhaps, but I’m sure that stress plays a larger role in our society than we give credit.

I was, for a long time, very dubious of positive thinking. Until I realized how my negative thought patterns affected me. I know how constant negativity from others brings me down. I don’t put up with it from others, why, then should I tolerate it from myself? However, self-slander cleverly disguised as discernment will get a pass every time.

We truly are what we think. I don’t mean this to say that we should bury our heads in the sand but we need to watch what we take in. Negativity breeds negativity and positivity breeds, you guessed it, positivity. I had to limit and cut out a lot of my newsfeeds. It was making me anxious and annoyed.

But sometimes we like being annoyed, for a couple of reasons. Simply because we feel something; It takes time and energy, which otherwise might be spent on something else. It gives us something to do. It makes us feel important. Kind of like George, on Seinfeld, who found that the secret of looking busy was to look annoyed. Don’t laugh. It’s true.

Any temporary “benefits,” we might gain from aggravation; importance, something to do, etc, are not worth the ingrained habits we develop as a result. We will become jaded, cynical, hard to please, and miserable company.

Steve Jobs said that being fired from Apple was one of the best things that could have happened to him, because it forced him to start again as a “beginner.” There are many benefits that a novice can bring, the fact that they are neither jaded nor cynical, being first and foremost. Have you ever watched a child try something new? They don’t have the experience to know that something doesn’t work, so they’ll persistently try anything. If it doesn’t work, they’ll move on more easily than an expert trying a proven method would.

There are many tips to dealing with anxiety, that don’t require drugs. But there are no short cuts. True change has to come from inside, ideas must be shattered, habits must be broken. It takes intention, tenacity, and resoluteness.