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")

1. The first step to overcoming anxiety is to recognize and believe that this is just an emotional state that all humans have to varying degrees. Anxiety is not a mental disorder, it is a state within our control under certain circumstances, and it is not a disease. It is however a dis ease that rumbles through our nervous system and may have a powerful pull towards dis-regulating our functioning and hijacking our life force. In some cases, anxiety does have physiological roots, but if you go to have this assessed by a psychiatrist, remember, that more often than not they want to treat the symptom as if it were a disease, which means pharmacology. It is likely you will get symptom relief from the pharmacology but this will not necessarily address the underlying cause. Learning to self-manage whenever possible has the potential to give longer lasting relief. If we can understand that feeling anxious is normal, and it can be within our control, we will be taking both the stigma of having anxiety away, and we will be building our confidence and resilience when it appears. These are fundamental truths for me that are essential for keeping my pro-active desires functional. Even if there is a physiological reason for the anxiety I need to find more internal resilience to mange it more completely. 2. Once you can get control the stigma and power of anxiety can be neutralized. When you do not accept this state as a power source over yourself you can begin to find tools to use that will minimize your emotional distress, and you will find ways to master your behavioral responses. If you feel like anxiety is more powerful than your will you will feel hopeless in the face of it; this is when we do not even search for resources to help ourselves. It is essential for use to utilize our mental capacities to their fullest in order to offer proper resistance to the anxious state. Also, it is not helpful to “power through” the anxiety as it builds up in your system. When you “power through” the anxiety until it is over and you feel this tremendous relief, what you are really doing is developing a pattern that your body will remember. The pattern is that in order to feel relieve you first have to have these intense feelings. You do nothing to diminish the repetition of getting anxiety, all you do is train your body to a first feel highly charged and then it will feel good. I call this trying to stop the train five miles down the track after it has a full head of steam. Conversely, it will serve you better in the long run to titrate and discharge the energy of anxiety as it begins to build and be felt in your system. This way you will have emotional states that are within your purview to control. I call this stopping the train in the wheel house. As this exercise gets practiced and repeated, you will notice the charge of your anxious state will rarely if ever rise to “red line” level. Which train would you rather try to stop. 3. In blog 1 I addressed some of the signs of anxiety that we tend to by-pass. Imagine how you might be able to control the anxiety if you paid attention to these signs when they were in their early stages. let me ask you, would you rather try to stop the train while it was just warming up in the wheel house, or would you rather try to stop the train 5 miles down the track when it has a full head of steam powering it? Although it is an asset to have compensation skills that allow you to move past the little annoyances of life, it is a liability to always move past the small signals from our body. After all, how long does it take to assess if there is something about to happen that might be generating anxiety. remember, we already decided we are not weak, nor do we have a mental disorder if we are anxious, anxiety is normal. So let’s pay attention to these more subtle signs, make an assessment, and if we are anxious, let’s develop a strategy for addressing it. Now we are slowing the anxiety down, dealing with it in a manageable dose, and it is less likely to get out of control. 4. Word-smithing When we wordsmith our speech we actually alter our perception. For example, “In the past, that would have made me anxious, but now I know how to move through this with minimal to no disruption to my life force and life flow.” Can you see the difference between that sentence and the sentence stating “This type of situation always makes me anxious”. We are not tricking ourselves, we are make cognitive conscious corrections that will also stimulate the visual cortex and the motor cortex, and we are likely to make different, more optimal choices with our behaviors. An even more effective word-smithing would be to eliminate all references to anything remotely negative. “I love the new strength I have developed through the hard work of being more conscious and more present to what is happening now.” The word-smithing now produces images of strength and capability. It suggests the anxiety is something in the past without even needing to address it by name, and it radiates confidence in us. It also highlights that through our hard conscious efforts, we have opened new pathways and new, more functional default responses to similar stimuli. In essence, we are stating “I feel I am strong, and stronger than the anxiety.” 5. Orienting a) You can orient to the environment you are in now; Look at the bouquet of colors around you, maybe focus on all the red things or blue things in your environment. listen to what sounds you hear, or what are the aromas you like in this environment. b) When you orient to your current environment you are leaving your fears of the future to be present, and when you are present you are more likely to be connected to your essence; this will aid you to finding a conscious solution. c) Call your observing self up to pay attention to what your bodily sensations are, write them down: • constriction in the chest • churning of the stomach • sweating • avoiding behaviors • excessive use of chemicals such as alcohol • or any of the others listed above As you make your observations to these sensation and behaviors, pay attention to thoughts that may enter, and emotions that may also be present. This is about you. See what action plan you can develop for dealing with this issue. We always want to assess if there is a real threat, and if there is not then we want to be able to mange our level of perceived threat. Putting our perceived threats in perspective is essential, and we must stop that train before it pulls out of the wheel house. We also want to strengthen our will and dig deep into our self-confidence so we can stay connected to our neocortex. These are suggestions and can be practiced by any individual. I would strongly suggest working with a therapist trained in self management of anxiety. I am also please to inform you that I and my business partners have recently received our patent pending letter for a virtual device that is completely unique from those currently on the market that deal with anxiety. The VTG2 (The Virtual Therapy Guidance Group) is working diligently to bring this to market ASAP.