Strengthening Your Immunity to Anxiety 

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first…

We can’t get rid of anxiety. Whether it’s of the coronavirus or some other stressor in your life, anxiety is an essential human experience. Like sadness or anger, it’s here to stay. It communicates danger and readies us to respond. We need it to survive, so we need to learn to live with it. 

Learning to live with today’s heightening anxiety is a little like living with this virus itself. We’ll ultimately survive this pandemic by building immunity. We’ll survive our anxiety the same way. 

In the viral world, we inoculate ourselves to harmful invaders by being present and mixing with them (mixing with inert versions of the virus in the case of vaccinations). In mixing with foreign substances, the body learns. It learns to recognize and respond appropriately. It learns not to over react and learns not to under react. 

Similarly, easing your anxiety of the coronavirus will require that you stand toe to toe with your fear, mixing with it, acknowledging it — without minimizing or exaggerating — inoculating yourself against it. The more we practice this, the stronger our immunity, and the better our ability to be resilient in the face of worry, fear, and panic. 

Now the good news…

We can increase our capacity to stand toe to toe with fear by creating a space between the very heart of who we are and the part of us that experiences anxiety. This can then empower us to accept anxiety and fear instead of being taken over by them! From there, we can choose how we respond to this crisis, proactively.

And we do this by learning how to just notice…

Just Pause, Notice, and Accept 

The first and easiest thing you can do to start building your immunity in the face of anxiety is to practice the art of noticing.

You need to learn how to just pause and notice all the noise that’s going on in your head.

You need to learn how to just pause and notice what your body is sensing and experiencing.

You need to learn how to just pause, notice, and be with all the feelings you are having, one moment to the next. 

Noticing includes bringing an attitude of acceptance to what’s there. The key here is that you won’t try to change or control what you are noticing. You’ll do the opposite — you’ll bring an intention of acceptance to whatever you encounter. You’ll allow it to be there, make room for it, embrace it!

I know this must sound absurd, underwhelming, even counterintuitive. You’re feeling big fear so you are looking for big medicine. You think, “these thoughts and feelings are so uncomfortable, shouldn’t I try to combat them or get rid of them somehow?”

The unequivocal answer is NO!

The more we try to change or rid ourselves of anxious thoughts and feelings, the more they end up controlling us and the stickier they get. In fact, anxiety and fear often start to ease the moment we stop this battle, stop trying to manage them, the moment we begin to see them — from a distance.

Like our coronavirus strategy, we need help ‘distancing’. We need to create some distance between ourselves (the observing you, the enduring you, your center and core, the essential you — the heart!) and the thoughts, feelings, and bodily reactions the heart of you is experiencing. Six feet isn’t required here, just a sliver is all you need to start to see that you are so much more than your worry and fear. 

We’ve been told a lie over the years. The lie is that we are our thoughts and feelings. That’s not true. Thoughts and feelings can be an aspect of what we experience, but they are not the truth of who we are. They don’t have to define us, they don’t have to dictate our actions. Reactive thoughts and feelings don’t have to be in charge. 

Increasing our observing and noticing muscle strengthens our ability to access the heart of who we are, the essential and vital part of our being. This can ultimately give us the power we need to make healthy, deliberate, and informed choices — taking our lives back from our reactive autopilot and from our anxiety, fear, and panic.

Here’s an exercise called MIND WATCHING to help you practice this skill. Try this a few minutes a day. Those of you familiar with mindfulness practices will recognize this.

Mind Watching

• Find a comfortable and quiet place to sit down. Place hands, palms down, on your lap.

• Notice and focus on your breath, don’t control it, just notice it.

• Soon you’ll be distracted by a thought, maybe an intrusive or uncomfortable thought about this virus. Notice the thought, even name it, “thought about the virus.” You might imagine this thought as a puffy white cloud in the sky. It’s there to see, but slowly moving along with the breeze.

• After you name your thought, return to the focus on your breath.

• Before long you might be distracted by a feeling, maybe worry or fear. Name the feeling “worry” or “fear.” Again, maybe imagine the feeling as a cloud moving slowly along in the sky.

• Return to your breath focus.

• Before long you might be distracted by a sensation in your body. Name the sensation as you experience it, “tightness in chest,” for example. You might bring an intention of acceptance and warmth to that part of your body.

• Return to breath.

• Repeat.

The goal in this exercise IS NOT to get rid of or change your thoughts, feelings, or body sensations in any way. The goal is to notice them, even accept, allow, and make room for them, just as they are, but from a distance, the distance of your observing self.

Keep practicing moving back and forth between breath and experience. Remember, we are not trying to focus on our breath in order to avoid the mind or body. We are simply learning that we have the ability to move back and forth between breath and experience. We have the ability to focus our attention with intention.

In moving back and forth from what we experience to an anchoring breath we begin to see that we have the capacity to observe, from a distance, what we are experiencing instead of being reactively taken over by it.  

Your breath is always there, a reliable anchor. Like a boat anchors itself in the harbor to steady it in the midst of a storm, your breath can anchor you in the midst of the storm of changing and unpleasant thoughts and feelings.

We don’t have to change anxiety, we have to change the way we relate to it.

Distance Creates Freedom

One of our greatest human gifts is our ability to be aware of awareness. We can think about thinking. The Mind Watching Exercise will strengthen your ability to see that with a little focus, you always have access to this observational, “meta,” part of you. From there you can observe what’s going on, from a distance. From there, reacting less, you’ll have more freedom to choose how you respond. You can even choose to respond to your fear with kindness and compassion! (more on that later)

You might think of this observing part of you as your wiser self, the most essential and compassionate part of you that’s enduring over time — your heart!

In my next post I’ll help you explore this heart I keep referencing. To ease our anxiety we will need to get back to the heart of the matter. We’ll need to get back to who we are, what we value, what’s meaningful and important to us. Turns out the best way to address anxiety is to start living again!