Dear Readers • When I asked people on Facebook how to best support a friend who suffers from anxiety, I heard from a number of people dealing with anxiety themselves who shared tips for coping. I thought this letter was especially useful.
Dear Ann Cannon • Therapy.
I’ve experienced anxiety (which often goes hand in hand with its good friend depression) since around the time I was about to graduate college. Even before that mildly. Since then I have fairly regularly spoken with a therapist. It’s a scary idea for some. I know I used to feel “other” for needing therapy. But now I view it in the same light as going to the gym, but for my brain. And I talk and work through all sorts of things, including but not limited to the times I feel anxiety.
For me, my anxiety can lay dormant for years, but when a big change happens in my life, it crops up. I know now to expect it, but when I didn’t — when I was younger — I genuinely thought something wrong with me.
But there is nothing wrong. My brain just is more prone to the anxiety. So, it’s said that anxiety is a leftover from the caveman brain days. It’s tied into fight or flight. It’s basically pure flight — your brain is literally saying THERE IS DANGER!!!! And often, the anxiety is tied to something you are thinking of in the past, but most frequently something you have ZERO control over in the future. The what-ifs. There’s a million of them if you let yourself think of them all.
So, one exercise I learned is mindfulness via checking in with my senses. In a moment of anxiety, where I feel the electricity in my chest and a flurry of emotion, I am supposed to step back and assess: What do I see? (Right now, my fingers on a keyboard.) What do I hear? (That keyboard clacking and a plane in the air somewhere.) What do I smell? (Coffee.) What do I taste? (Coffee.) What do I feel? (All my blankets.) This is supposed to bring me and ground me in the right here and right now, so that I’m not thinking of that far-off, distant possibility that I might fail or that I might get sick or on and on the things my anxiety might make me think ad nauseam. The practice is also part of a bigger narrative of identifying thoughts that are in your brain and trying to let them go.
Anyway, all of that above is stuff I never would have known and would have suffered endlessly for not knowing had I not spent my time speaking with a great therapist. And the good thing is this: When I am having a really hard time, I can go once a week, even more if I need it. If I am even and stable with my brain, I go once a month. It’s just a really, really great option.
Other great things that help: being out in nature (going to a park even) and exercise.
I hope all of this is helpful in some way. And, again, I cannot emphasize enough that this is a totally normal brain function. Feeling abnormal for having anxiety is like feeling abnormal for having a tailbone. Some things just haven’t evolved away from us enough yet.
— Dealing With It
Ann Cannon is The Tribune’s advice columnist. Got a question for Ann? Email her at askann@sltrib.com or visit the Ask Ann Cannon page on Facebook.
