The first blog on anxiety sets the stage for understanding the various ways anxiety hijacks our life force and our life flow. The second blog describes how anxiety often manifests itself in physiological and behavioral signs and symptoms. It reveals how such manifestations of anxiety ramp up quickly and immobilizes our functionality. These first two blogs are inextricably linked. They cannot be fully separated or denied, just as the notion of one plus one equals two cannot be disputed. The third and final blog will describe how we can be filled with a renewed sense of strength and capability as we find new pathways to regulate our systems and calm our anxieties. When we think all is lost, blog number three calls us to action to lessen the effects of anxiety in our lives, leading us to restore a sense of control and wonderment. Attention to the third blog can hold wonderful possibilities that can be life changing and affirming.

When we spend time being anxious, we are not propelling ourselves forward on our pro-active path. Anxiety steals our precious time; and time is our most cherished and valuable asset. Every minute that passes is a minute lost. Time cannot be recaptured or made up. When it passes, it is gone. When we lose time in this manner we also lose some of our precious energy units. When energy units are spent on anxiety we have less energy for more desired pro-active activities. Anxiety hijacks our time and our energy. Our desire to be engaged in life has our foot on the gas to proceed forward, but our anxiety slams the other foot hard on the brake, while grabbing the steering wheel and taking us down a long and tiring dead end road. What’s even worse is the fact that our anxiety takes us down the same road over and over again. We have to get control over our anxiety, because if we complacently accept our anxious states as a Fait Accomply we will forever be locked in this Sisyphusian vortex. Anxiety holds us back from what we want to do and from where we want to go, and anxiety generates patterns of behaviors that become self-sabotaging, often causing us to repeat them again and again. We do not want to repeat uncomfortable patterns, nor do we want to spin in the vortex of anxiety but because we do not know how to get out of the vortex, our lives become hijacked. We all have a limited number of "energy units", and anxiety steals them from us. Hypothetically, if we have 5 units of energy to spend on today’s activities, and we want to proceed with the tasks before us in a proactive manner, our best performance will take place if all our energy units are focused on those tasks. Since our anxiety is taking our energy units in another direction, these needed energy units are not available for what we desire to do pro-actively. Let’s consider the following hypothetical scenario: My friends have invited me to play golf at a beautiful golf course located 50 miles from my house. However, I suffer from agoraphobia, and I do not like to be a passenger in a car. New environments and travel are two triggers that tend to feed my anxiety, and to make matters worse, I am not in control because someone else is driving. My desire is to go and be with my friends, to play golf and enjoy the beauty of the golf course. But my anxiety is triggered by having to travel in a car with multiple people, and go to a new and unfamiliar environment. As my anxiety fixates on how I am going to cope with all this I also become concerned about how I will perform on the golf course, a new unsafe environment. Now I find I am becoming anxious about being anxious. Once the juices of anxiety start flowing they can become relentless. Our internal story about the issues generating the anxiety grows exponentially, often without pause and strays far away from any reality, except the reality of being stuck in the eddy of anxiety. Under optimal conditions to play a good round of golf, I want to concentrate on: • spending my energy units on the course I am about to play and my course management, • thinking about the techniques of the game on which I have been working and practicing, and • putting energy into making sure I am in a relaxed place so what I have integrated about golf techniques can just flow through me in a natural unimpeded relaxed manner. • I also want to enjoy the company of my friends. As paradoxical as this might sound, it requires hard work and energy to relax and not work so hard. However, when that relaxed state is achieved, it feels great. Think of being in the zone. This is where I desire to be for my golf outing with my friends. However, in the above scenario my anxiety has hijacked my energy units and now all my energy is being put into attempting to manage my anxiety. Not only does this produce even more anxiety, but my self-confidence begins to erode because I feel silly and inadequate for having the anxiety in the first place. I will probably withdraw socially as well because I am anxious about my anxiety being observed by my friends. That dang anxiety has hijacked my proactive energy units, and drained them to the extent that now I have fewer if any energy units left for focusing on golf. I have also lost valuable time, my golf game is likely to be sub-optimal, and my confidence has slipped into the quicksand of self-doubt. The anxiety has hijacked both my life force and my life flow. This big "punch-in-the-stomach " that anxiety delivers to our self-confidence transpires insidiously and at hyper speed, and undermines the core of our being. Anxiety has us automatically feeling weak, and less than we want to feel. These pejorative perceptions of ourselves feels like reality, and when they feel real, we think and act as if they are real. Our precious time, our precious energy units, and our self-esteem have been hijacked and are being held captive to an energy source we perceive to be stronger than our will to conquer this villain named anxiety. This is an attack from within and will continue to drain our precious energy units and our precious time. Each time this occurs we lose confidence in our innate ability to control ourselves because the anxiety spreads strong roots that lead to the development of patterns of behaviors and speech that re-enforce our perceived weakness. For example, we begin making statements like, "These types of situations always make me anxious. " When we make statements like this we are saying that our anxiety owns us, and we believe it is automatic that the anxiety will be present. We also feel and believe we are powerless to do something about our anxiety. One of the problems with show stopping anxiety is the speed at which it can ramp up. Rarely does anxiety appear as a slow train moving at a steady terrapin speed. Anxiety usually goes from zero to red line in a nano second, and before you know it you are spinning out of control. Anxiety is a natural state, and can even serve a positive function by bringing awareness to us, but it has to be managed, which it rarely is, by any of us. The purpose of this blog was just to identify the many ways, and the disruptive nature of anxiety. This is unfortunately a state that takes the life force out of many people; it is real, and it is powerful in destructive ways to our lives. SEE PART 2 BELOW

Anxiety reveals itself in many ways, both overtly and covertly; and sometimes we may misinterpret what is overt because none of us want to admit we are anxious. The explanation for that seems rather simple; anxiety is seen as a weakness, and as a mental illness that requires medication under certain circumstances. In reality, anxiety is just an emotional state that has the potential to debilitate us, unless we can get a handle on it when it initially presents physiologically. Your anxiety probably has been in existence for many years and grooved a pattern of responses that are sub-optimal for your pro-active life flow. Unfortunately these transitory emotional states and behaviors that accompany them feel inevitable and "normal". However, as you learn to catch the early signs of anxiety, there are ways to manage it so it only becomes a small speed bump in each particular moment. You do not have to feel like you are being dragged down the track on a run away train. When your stomach is churning and upset or your chest is constricted and/or throbbing, it is "kinder", we assume, to think of ourselves as suffering from a physical ailment. So we may make statements, such as "It must be something I ate" or "I must be coming down with a respiratory illness." We tend to first look elsewhere for the answer to our physiological discomforts; we want these physiological discomforts to have a physical etiology. We do not think, "I have these symptoms because I am anxious", even though these are a couple of the common physiological signs of anxiety. Other signs of anxiety include: • a breathing pattern that has become quicker • a tendency to holding your breath • episodes of sweating • a sudden inability to concentrate • eating incessantly even when you are not hungry • loss of appetite • sleep disturbance • compulsively playing a game on your iPhone • discomfort being in social situations • disturbance in the lower GI tract • finding yourself tapping your feet or moving your feet or legs like the needle on a sewing machine • feeling tired and lethargic for no clear and understandable reason • feeling like we want to withdraw for social contact There are many more signs of anxiety, and these are just a few of the most common physiological signs. I, like you, can recognize all these symptoms because anxiety is an emotional state we all experience. Of course, all these symptoms and many others may have an underlying physiological etiology that could be a signal of something other than anxiety, but as we have all experienced time and time again, we usually find that it is anxiety of some sort that is causing these symptoms which disrupt our regulation. Anxiety also appears around events in our lives that are not enjoyable but may be necessities. For example, surgeries typically generate anxiety, but they are a necessity for eradicating some physical ailments. The physical signs and signals are likely be the same as with any other anxiety producing situation. It does not matter why the anxiety is there, what matters most is that we know how to identify the early signals of its existence. Next we want to manage it so it does not distract us from being more fluid with the flow of our lives. It is also possible for anxiety to be a warning sign of real danger, so it serves a very important purpose. Since all the internal warning signs of anxiety are basically the same, it is essential our system does not go into an old default patterned response when these physiological symptoms appear. When we have those default implicit responses we typically lose our ability to judge the current situation for what it actually is. Anxiety that is very severe, chronic, and untreated, has a high potential to turn into real, and sometimes serious physical ailments. It is common that autoimmune disorders start as untreated anxieties. This is another reason we want to recognize the early, even the earliest of the early signs of anxiety. We want to calm our system down before it makes a turn towards something more serious. We all have things in life that produce anxiety and stress. These moments in time should not be moments of embarrassment or shame; nor should they become the norm as a systemic debilitating response that hijacks our system away from being present with what we want to be doing. These moments can be wonderful opportunities for us to dig into our toolbox of resources, and to strengthen our resilience to the normal winds of life that tend to knock us off center. Severe anxiety can also turn into panic attacks and these can take many forms. I will describe a personal moment in time when this happened to me. Life’s stresses were building up; but since I am who I am, along my route to Panicsville I used all my compensatory statements, such as "I can handle this. It’s not a big deal." You get the idea. The anxiety was being stored and buried deep inside, until my system could not handle it any more. Then, in the middle of the night I woke up in a coughing fit, collapsed on the bathroom floor in a deep sweat, and insisted to my concerned wife that everything was perfectly fine. For some unbeknownst reason to me, she didn’t believe my words as she was observing me sweat and cringe in pain on the bathroom floor. So she drove me to the ER. Once in the ER, they were sure I was having a heart attack and they ran all their tests as 10 different people asked me the same 15 questions within a 2 hour time period. At the end of their evaluation they were unsure how to diagnose me. Other than having normal blood work and no pain in my left arm, all the symptoms mimicked a heart attack; but clearly I was not having a heart attack. It’s a good thing I had studied some neuroscience, and I understood a little something about the 10th cranial Vagus nerve that controls the heart and can stimulate the system to mimic a heart attack when the system is under severe stress. Anxiety is a form of stress on the system, and conversely, life stress can cause anxiety. What is interesting about that personal anecdote is that although my “normal” anxieties are relatively minor and almost never disrupting to my movements through life, given the right set of circumstances, even a person like me can become debilitated by anxiety. This is an emotional and physiological state that all humans have in varying degrees, and at any given moment we may find ourselves surprised by the degree and power of our anxiety. One of the major problems with chronic anxiety is that we develop defenses that are designed to protect us from feeling these emotional states. These defenses soon become an integral part of our personality and we habituate to thinking that this is who we are and then we stop trying to really fix the root cause of the anxiety. Above is a brief description of some of the common physiological signs of anxiety, but there are other signs we can pay attention to as well. Anxiety represents a fear, typically of something in the future, and when we are fearful of something we will look to avoid or gain control over the situation. Also, if our fear of something in the future becomes so strong, it will take us away from the present moment. At those times we are responding now, to the future that has yet to happen, and we are losing the connection to ourselves and what we want to be doing right in this moment. Not only do we lose this moment, we have compromised our ability to think about how to best respond to the situation in the future. If we were to stay connected to ourselves, and this moment in time, we probably would be able to think of a strategy for dealing with the situation that made us anxious. People with phobias look to take strong control over conversations to avoid being triggered by the issue that may throw them into a full-blown anxiety attack. Any time the trigger topic appears, this person adeptly switches the primary topic of the conversation. Other people may take control of a conversation by speaking so fast and so much that there is no air space for your voice to enter into the conversation. Other people deal with their anxiety by always speaking about their anxiety. Then there are those who dissociate during conversations or during moments in time so as not to feel their anxiety. We have many compensation strategies to avoid anxiety. It is normal to attempt to avoid anxiety, and therefore dissociation is a strategy used unconsciously by our system so we do not overload our capacity to cope. Unfortunately, if we utilize a strategy to the point it becomes a primary behavioral pattern and our primary default mechanism of functioning, it is highly likely this "strategy" will be hijacking our life force and our life flow. This would be sub-optimal. The intention of this blog was to bring awareness to signs of anxiety being in your filed. SEE PART 3 BELOW (Click "Read Additional Blogs")