The root cause of your anxiety
A million reasons why your anxiety is showing up and why it is, contrary to popular belief, not to be mistaken for the plague but to be recognised as a carrier of wisdom.
First and foremost, it is crucial to understand that anxiety is not to be treated as the enemy or the pest that makes our lives miserable. Like any other emotion, anxiety deserves its place and has a reason why it might show up. It does not arise randomly or by accident. While I am aware that there are a million reasons for its origins, today I want to share with you the most common ones that I observe in myself as well as in the people around me. I hope these will help you better understand the nature of anxiety so that you are equipped with tools to work with rather than against it.
To spoil the good news in advance: we have so much more power and control over anxiety than we like to think. The bad news is that we might have to face some uncomfortable truths that require us to change things we would rather avoid.
Creating a healthy and safe environment for ourselves is the foundation for our mental and emotional wellbeing. And yet we keep ourselves in environments that contribute to our anxiety levels and sometimes catapult them through the roof. It seems that many of us do not fully understand the meaning of a “safe environment” and how that should look like because we are not familiar with it. So we remain in environments that are unfavourable for our overall well-being and wonder why we feel anxious all the time.
GENERAL NEEDS: How well do you know yourself? Are you aware of your needs and do you make sure that they are met? Met by yourself and others? For example, if you are someone who feels cold quickly and easily, it is your responsibility to create a home for yourself that is warm and live in a flat/house that is well insulated. Ignoring your own need and forcing yourself to live in an old, poorly insulated house will skyrocket your anxiety levels. Being warm and dry in cold weather is a basic human need. Anxiety signals to you that you are ignoring/not meeting that need.
PERSONAL NEEDS: If your dream is to be in a healthy, loving relationship, but you keep entertaining low effort candidates, perhaps even allowing them to use your body because you secretly hope that by doing so they will miraculously fall in love and commit to you, you are not only violating your own body and dignity but also your need for a committed partner. Investing your time and energy into someone who has no interest in building a relationship with you, creates anxiety screaming at you that you are invested in the wrong person.
RELATIONAL NEEDS: Being in the wrong relationship can and will also create all sorts of anxieties. But we often prefer to look away and ignore our own inner knowing because we do not want to face the discomfort of ending something that emotionally might have ended months or years ago. We are afraid that there is no one better out there, that we do not deserve any better or simply because we do not want to be alone. This mindset alone gives me anxiety. How can you recognise if you are in the wrong relationship? It is so easy and yet most people keep stuck in bad relationships because they are used to them and do not know how a good one would feel and look like.
You know you are in the wrong relationship when:
you do not feel seen, heard and understood
you feel you have to hide certain parts of yourself
you find yourself not expressing things in order to keep the peace
you feel lonely even though you have a partner
you do not laugh together / you cannot cry together
you cannot have the difficult conversations together
there is no repair after rupture, resentment builds and is never resolved
your body shuts down in their presence
you become less of who you are (the right relationship will help you become more of who you are)
you catch yourself fantasising about other men/women
In these first few examples it becomes clear that anxiety merely acts as the messenger, showing you that something in the relationship is off. Not all anxieties mean that you need to end the relationship. But if you have been with a long-term partner and you are not enjoying each others presence and not enriching each others lives, it is worth investigating more deeply whether or not you have your basic relational needs met and if you are meeting your partner’s. By the way, the same rules apply to friendships too. The ones that would cease to exist if you stopped reaching out. The ones that do not make an effort to remember your birthday. The ones who are there for the good times only.
WORK/PURPOSE/FULFILMENT: Going to work day in and day out to do a job that you hate will create anxiety levels I cannot even begin to explain. This is also the reason why so many people suffer from the infamous “Sunday Scaries”. We are all born with natural inclinations, an innate disposition. This is why when we let children play freely one will run and chase the ball, the other will pick flowers, another play chef or console the one who fell and hurt their knee, every single one following their natural disposition and going for the thing that is most exciting to them. Now imagine forcing the ball enthusiast to go pick flowers, every single day. For weeks. And months. Years.
Going against our natural disposition, especially over extended periods of time, creates immense anxiety. It is the body’s way of communicating that we are working against our nature and following a wrong professional path. This kind of anxiety can and will greatly improve once we reconnect with our authentic self and become more aware of the things that we are naturally good at, things that we are interested in and enjoy doing. The easiest way to determine whether or not you are doing work that is aligned with you is by the way you feel in your body; aligned work feels light and easy with a relaxed body and often gives us energy and almost does not feel like “work”, whereas unaligned work drains, the body feels anxious, stressed and tensed up. It erodes our joy and spirit.
PERSONAL RHYTHM: Another anxiety-inducing pattern I notice time and time again in myself is when I disconnect from my own rhythm, pace of being, living, communicating. For example, when someone in conversation asks me a question and instead of pausing before replying, I rush into some generic answer that I feel the other expects from me: Boom! Anxiety hits. On the other hand, every single time I manage to pause and allow myself to be me, to take a moment to find the right words (especially when communicating in a language that is not my native) and then respond from a collected place, instead of anxious I feel so wonderful and powerful because I honour my own rhythm.
It is a seemingly small detail with a deep impact on my wellbeing and also affects the perception someone else has of me. The energy of people who live in a constant rush will likely make us feel rushed to respond, rushed to make a decision. Our practice here is to stay connected to our own inner being, whatever inner state the other might be in and remain fully present and respond in our own time.
INCESSANT THINKING: Of course we cannot talk about anxiety without addressing one of the greatest factors that disturbs our system and makes us anxious: incessant negative and catastrophic thinking, which I am a total expert in by the way. Having sorrowful thoughts and anticipating the worst comes as a by-product of accumulated negative experiences we have had earlier in life. If you have ever tried, you will know that they cannot simply be switched off or forced into positive thinking instead. Nothing forced is ever going to be sustainable.
What we can do, however, is to notice those thoughts, observe them come, intensify and pass through. When we do not give them our attention, they usually dissipate very quickly and that space in us, that space that we are grows larger and stronger so that over time, we tend to no longer get pulled into those thoughts, we no longer believe them to be true, we do not identify with them (you are not your thoughts). This is something we can practise. So instead of attempting to stop thoughts we simply withdraw our attention from them, we stop feeding them and by doing so, they weaken over time, while our presence/the space in us strengthens.
But we have to be alert, the mind is cunning and will try everything (everything) to draw us back in and keep us there. When we follow the first negative thought that pops up, the loop continues with more and more negative thoughts because we feed it with our attention. It might suggest to worry about something terrible that might happen in the future or about something stupid we said to a stranger at a party two years ago. You know the drill. We break the cycle of following one thought after another with the help of conscious breathing and total presence. Your own sweet presence is the greatest tool to alleviate anxiety.
EMOTIONAL WOUNDS: This one deserves a whole separate article. I will try to keep it concise here. What all the above examples have in common, is an internal disconnect from our true nature that makes us act in ways that create stress and suffering. That disconnect usually stems from an earlier trauma (Greek: trauma = wound or injury), an emotional wound that could not be processed which will consequently try to get our attention through anxiety. Unprocessed trauma = anxiety. Here the anxiety asks for completion of the internal trauma processing procedure. It invites us to very gently allow for our system to process the trapped energies and release the often long-standing pain from it. Our bodies are highly intelligent and know exactly what to do with these wounds, but we often inadvertently interfere with this process because of our fear of actually having to feel the trauma. But the body’s wisdom knows better than the limited understanding of the mind and its only intention and purpose is for us to heal.
I remember vividly the first time I found myself triggered by a rude delivery man, while I was living in the Scottish Highlands. Enraged and scared at the same time, something in me remembered that inner procedure and made me pause in the middle of it. My desperate need to be validated by someone outside of myself ended there and then. For the very first time I managed to open to the pain that I was feeling. Of course it had nothing to do with the delivery man, he only served as a arse-angel, how Robert Betz lovingly calls the people who trigger our old wounds. When really they help us to access, process and heal them.
The intensity of emotional pain hit me like a ton of bricks while I stood there in my old living room, motionless, without running, fighting, numbing but slowly breathing into it, feeling a heatwave fill up my body, then feeling nauseous, nearly fainting, all the while my body was shaking, until the wave settled eventually. I also remember the relief it brought me afterwards and that two black spots on the soles of my feet that I had for years grew out and disappeared soon after this event (transformed pain leaving the body through my feet).
People experience this process in varying intensities and some of us have to do it over and over and over again, depending on how frequent and deep our wounds were. But this is the whole secret. This is what will transform our inner wounds, not a pill and not another person, although we can greatly benefit from the presence of another person, given they have the ability to be present and do not freak out by our storm. All that is required for emotional healing is our willingness to boldly and lovingly face it so that it can move in whatever way it needs to and transform back into its original state of light/love.
By the way, people who were not disturbed in their emotional development, meaning people who were allowed and supported with feeling all the feelings when they were little, will naturally allow for this internal process to happen whenever they face emotional distress. No one has hurt their emotional regulation system.
It is also important to mention that no one has invented this process. It is our ability to live and process and heal. And we are born with it. Imagine being born into a world that inevitably sooner or later will cause pain and sorrow without any tools to heal from it. It would be dire. Luckily nature has equipped us with all that we need. We only need to remember that we already have it.
To conclude this piece, I would like to remind you that today it is safe to reconnect and stay true to yourself so that you can act in alignment with the wisdom of your inner being. The connection to yourself requires PRESENCE and that, dearly beloved, is the strongest remedy for any kind of anxiety.
Love always,
Lana