I love the quote below that begins the section on anxiety. It reminds me of how much of my alcoholism relates to my delusion of control. This short article from the book ‘Not God’ by Ernst Kurtz does a good job of exploring this along with the corresponding denial of the spiritual.
Kurtz writes “Reality does not grant to humans absolute control over moods and feelings; emotions are meant to be responses to reality, and mainly to realities outside the self. Absolute control over emotion, in the sense of absolutely autonomous self-determination of moods and feelings, involved a claim to unlimitedness, and so a claim beyond any human.”
For me, the 3rd and 7th step prayers are a very good way of responding to my anxiety. These prayers are helping me practice surrender and humility as spiritual coping skills in the ceaseless uncertainty of living and life. And maybe as I develop trust in a Higher Power, I can also practice gratitude and thankfulness for the possibilities and potentials in uncertainty– Bruce M.
Anxiety
“You are afraid of surrender because you don’t want to lose control, but you never had control; all you had was anxiety.”
The American Psychological Association defines anxiety as “an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts and physical changes like increased blood pressure.” Anxiety can be both a state and a trait. To better understand this, let’s get clear on what these terms mean. The best explanation I’ve come across is from The Oxford Review Encyclopaedia of Terms. Here’s how they explain it:
- A trait is considered to be something that is part of an individual’s personality and therefore a long-term characteristic of an individual that shows through their behavior, actions, and feelings. It is seen as being a characteristic, feature, or quality of an individual. For example, someone who says “I am a confident person” or “I am just an anxious person” is stating that these attributes are part of who they are.
- A state, on the other hand, is a temporary condition that they are experiencing for a short period of time. After the state has passed, they will return to another condition. For example, someone who says “I am feeling quite confident about this interview” or “I feel nervous about doing this” is describing states.
I loved their closing sentence, which may be the understatement of the decade: “However, working out what is really a trait and what is a state can often be difficult and is the content of much scientific argument at times.”
So, when we say that anxiety can be both a state and a trait, it means that some of us feel anxious mainly in response to certain situations, while some of us can be naturally more predisposed to anxiety than others.
Generalized anxiety disorder is different from both trait and state anxiety. According to Johns Hopkins Medicine, “generalized anxiety disorder is a condition of excessive worry about everyday issues and situations.” It lasts longer than six months, and “in addition to feeling worried, you may also feel restlessness, fatigue, trouble concentrating, irritability, increased muscle tension, and trouble sleeping.”
Approximately one-third of U.S. adults will be affected by an anxiety disorder in their lifetime; however, it is estimated that fewer than half of people with diagnosable anxiety disorders seek any type of professional treatment. It’s very difficult to work through an anxiety disorder without professional help.
I’d describe myself as having frequent state anxiety with trait rising, and I know that therapy has been essential for me in terms of recognizing and understanding my reactions and developing techniques for working through my feelings of anxiety. I’ve also had to give up caffeine, commit to eight to nine hours of sleep a night, and exercise almost every day.
An intolerance for uncertainty is an important contributing factor to all types of anxiety. Those of us who are generally uncomfortable with uncertainty are more likely to experience anxiety in specific situations as well as to have trait anxiety and anxiety disorders.
Our anxiety often leads to one of two coping mechanisms: worry or avoidance. Unfortunately, neither of these coping strategies is very effective.
Worrying and anxiety go together, but worry is not an emotion; it’s the thinking part of anxiety. Worry is described as a chain of negative thoughts about bad things that might happen in the future.
What really got me about the worry research is that those of us with a tendency to worry believe it is helpful for coping (it is not), believe it is uncontrollable (which means we don’t try to stop worrying), and try to suppress worry thoughts (which actually strengthens and reinforces worry).
I’m not suggesting that we worry about worry, but it’s helpful to recognize that worrying is not a helpful coping mechanism, that we absolutely can learn how to control it, and that rather than suppressing worry, we need to dig into and address the emotion driving the thinking.
Avoidance, the second coping strategy for anxiety, is not showing up and often spending a lot of energy zigzagging around and away from that thing that already feels like it’s consuming us. And avoidance isn’t benign. It can hurt us, hurt other people, and lead to increased and mounting anxiety. In her book The Dance of Fear, Dr. Harriet Lerner writes, “It is not fear that stops you from doing the brave and true thing in your daily life. Rather, the problem is avoidance. You want to feel comfortable, so you avoid doing or saying the thing that will evoke fear and other difficult emotions. Avoidance will make you feel less vulnerable in the short run, but it will never make you less afraid.”
The entire premise of this book is that language has the power to define our experiences, and there’s no better example of this than anxiety and excitement.
Anxiety and excitement feel the same, but how we interpret and label them can determine how we experience them.
Even though excitement is described as an energized state of enthusiasm leading up to or during an enjoyable activity, it doesn’t always feel great. We can get the same “coming out of our skin” feeling that we experience when we’re feeling anxious. Similar sensations are labeled “anxiety” when we perceive them negatively and “excitement” when we perceive them positively. One important strategy when we’re in these feelings is to take a deep breath and try to determine whether we’re feeling anxiety or excitement. Researchers found that labeling the emotion as excitement seems to hinge on interpreting the bodily sensations as positive. The labels are important because they help us know what to do next.
Dread occurs frequently in response to high-probability negative events; its magnitude increases as the dreaded event draws nearer. Because dread makes an anticipated negative event even worse, we often prefer to get unpleasant things over with quickly, even if doing them sooner means that they will be more unpleasant (e.g., a more painful procedure now is preferred to a less painful procedure later).
I felt so called out when I read this. I can convince myself that an experience is going to be disastrous and work myself into a dread-frenzy. It’s terrible, because even if it goes well, I’m so dread-exhausted that I can’t enjoy it.
For anxiety and dread, the threat is in the future. For fear, the threat is now—in the present. Fear is a negative, short-lasting, high-alert emotion in response to a perceived threat, and, like anxiety, it can be measured as a state or trait. Some people have a higher propensity to experience fear than others.
Fear arises when we need to respond quickly to physical or psychological danger that is present and imminent. Because fear is a rapid-fire emotion, the physiological reaction can sometimes occur before we even realize that we are afraid. The typical responses are fight, flight, or freeze.
In the research, you can find many lists of what elicits fear in us. The items range from rodents and snakes, to the inability to see our surroundings, to observing our children in peril. However, no matter how much the lists vary, one item is on every list I’ve seen: the fear of social rejection. We can never forget that we experience social pain and physical pain in the same part of our brains, and the potential exposure to either type of pain drives fear.
To close this section, I want to go back to my friend and mentor Dr. Harriet Lerner. She writes, “Throughout evolutionary history, anxiety and fear have helped every species to be wary and to survive. Fear can signal us to act, or, alternatively, to resist the impulse to act. It can help us to make wise, self-protective choices in and out of relationships where we might otherwise sail mindlessly along, ignoring signs of trouble.”
Like all of the experiences in this book, both our anxiety and our fear need to be understood and respected, perhaps even befriended. We need to pull up a chair and sit with them, understand why they’re showing up, and ask ourselves what there is to learn. Dismissing fear and anxiety as not useful to our quest for connection is as dangerous as choosing to live in constant fear and anxiety.
Vulnerability
Vulnerability is the emotion that we experience during times of uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. It first emerged in my dissertation research, and it has been validated by every study I’ve done since. Through our research and training, we’ve asked tens of thousands of people to give us examples of vulnerability from their own lives. These are a few of the answers that directly pierce the emotion:
- The first date after my divorce
- Talking about race with my team
- Trying to get pregnant after my second miscarriage
- Talking about my feelings
- Starting my own business
- Watching my child leave for college
- Remembering that leaders don’t have all the answers, but ask important questions
- Apologizing to a colleague about how I spoke to him in a meeting
- Sending my son to orchestra practice knowing how badly he wants to make first chair and knowing there’s a really good chance he will not make the orchestra at all
- Waiting for the doctor to call back
- Giving and getting feedback
- Getting back up to bat after striking out
While these are uncomfortable and difficult experiences, there is no evidence that they are indicators of weakness. In fact, this is one of the biggest myths of vulnerability. We’ve found that across cultures, most of us were raised to believe that being vulnerable is being weak. This sets up an unresolvable tension for most of us, because we were also raised to be brave. There is no courage without vulnerability. Courage requires the willingness to lean into uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure.
In my most recent research on courage and leadership, the ability to embrace vulnerability emerged as the prerequisite for all of the daring leadership behaviors. If we can’t handle uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure in a way that aligns with our values and furthers our organizational goals, we can’t lead. In a world where perfectionism, pleasing, and proving are used as armor to protect our egos and our feelings, it takes a lot of courage to show up and be all in when we can’t control the outcome. It also takes discipline and self-awareness to understand what to share and with whom. Vulnerability is not oversharing, it’s sharing with people who have earned the right to hear our stories and our experiences.
Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our greatest measure of courage.
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