I needed a connecting flight and I needed a hotel room - now. I had no choice but to wait in a line that never moved. I felt my breathing speed up, I felt myself losing it. The situation was totally out of my control.
“I’m mental!” I wanted to shout. “You better serve me right now or there will be all hell to pay!”
I can see it now on the evening news: “‘Living Well’ author on airport rampage.”
Think of anxiety as the oil light that immediately goes on when the brain is in crisis. In reaction to stress. anxiety symptoms are invariably the first to manifest. Fix anxiety and you have a good chance of stopping stress from spreading. Fix anxiety and you may forget you have a mood disorder.
This is generally easier said than done. Anxiety is a serious mental illness, and unfortunately many of us look for quick fixes by turning to alcohol or recreational drugs or by abusing prescribed medications.
Fortunately, through mindfulness (see Mindfulness articles) and techniques learned from cognitive behavioral therapy (and other therapies), it is often possible to pick up baby anxieties and act fast.
Generally, the solutions are the same simple ones as for dealing with stress or nipping incipient mood episodes in the bud - time-outs, stop and smell the roses moments, breathing, getting a good night’s sleep, and so on.
These strategies also involve recognizing erroneous thoughts as they occur, such as: “If I’m late for work I will lose my job.” Last thing we want is to set off a chain-reaction of irrational thinking, such as: “How will I pay the rent? I’ll never find another job! It’s all Bill’s fault, that no-good ...”
People generally feel less anxious when they rationally conclude that being late for work is not the end of the world. But rationality is not second-nature to many of us, especially when our oversensitive limbic systems over-react and override the thinking parts of the brain. Practice makes (sort of) perfect.
Meanwhile, tried-and-true stress-busters such as yoga, conscious breathing, meditation, and visualization apply with equal force to anxiety (more on these and other practices in a future article).
