Misunderstood
Anxiety. Anxiety is often misunderstood as being an unnecessary impediment to human functioning. This has led to a war on anxiety over the past decade. Anxiety is considered a barrier to being able to perform well, or even perform at all in education and other settings. This is so wrong and so harmful. If it weren’t for anxiety, we would not have survived as a species. Anxiety and like emotions are important pieces of information about our internal and external environment. Effective performance not only can occur but most often does occur in the presence of negative internal states.
A metaphor to help understand anxiety and how to respond to it effectively is “anxiety is like quicksand”. You are walking along a path and you find yourself standing in quicksand. You begin to sink. You panic and begin to struggle to get out and get away from the quicksand. But the more you fight it, the more it drags you in and down.
Anxiety can be like quicksand. Like quicksand, trying to push away from anxiety not only is ineffective, but also takes the energy and focus that you would normally put towards acting in service of your values and towards your goals.
A passerby sees you and asks what the problem is. You say “I’m trapped in quicksand What should I do?.” The passerby says “You will probably find this difficult, but open up and lay yourself out. You will stop sinking and stay afloat on the quicksand. When you stop sinking you will be able to roll out slowly.”
Similarly with anxiety, when we open up to negative internal experience, their grip on us will ease and we will be able to move forward effectively down our path again. As we unhook from anxiety and stop the struggle to try to change it, we gain confidence in our ability to act in service of our values and the intensity of the internal experiences decrease. We begin to recognize these as internal experiences and not real events that we must respond to.
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Richard Hock
That was very informative and interesting. I liked the analogy you provided and yes, humans as a species have always had to struggle whether internally or externally and that continues to today.