First a word about this blog… I realize that it has been more than a year since my last post! I do not have any real excuse other than I’ve been quite busy. I also am still uncertain what I would like this writing to become. In the meantime, for the people who browse this blog, I can promise to be consistent with inconsistency and will try to provide updates when I am able. Three cheers to keeping up with everything we have in our lives, am I right? Now, on to the topic:
Anxiety is an over-used and outdated term. What we describe as “anxiety” is really a combination of both the somatic experience of stress hormones entering our blood stream, causing a cascade of activation in our nervous system and organs, and, importantly, the cognitive appraisal and narrative of these sensations. Anxiety generally tends to be used as a negative term. To be “anxious” is to have a feeling of “unease” about something with an uncertain outcome. It is usually understood to be an unpleasant sensation or anticipation. We have a huge amount of preconceptions about the experience of stress because of the semantics of the word “anxious” or “anxiety”, and it often becomes a heavy prediction about someone’s identity. “An ANXIOUS person” is a phrase that in our culture implies that someone has more difficulty than average dealing with things in life.
A more truthful and useful way to describe the experience of “nerves” or “anxiety” is to say we are “stress-sensitive”. This phrase is a way to capture what it is like to be a person that naturally is very responsive to changes in biological homeostatis (the balance that our system/body is always trying to achieve to maintain stable conditions) that may be triggered by changes in our routine, new challenges, difficult thoughts, or disruptions to our expectations. Stress-sensitivity in this way just means that the person either has more stress hormones released in their body when confronting a stressor, has organ systems that are more sensitive to this stress hormones , or is just more in tune to the interoception (perception of sensations inside the body, i.e. heartbeat) than average. That person may also THINK about their stress reaction more, or anticipate the sensations in their body and try to avoid them. To think of oneself as “stress-sensitive”, rather than “anxious” adjusts the cognitive appraisal of the experience to one of natural biological response, and lessens the psychological discomfort around the sensations associated with stress hormones. Lessening the psychological resistance or fear related to the somatic experience of stress, then allows one to relax around the feelings, accepting them, rather than blaming oneself, feeling upset with oneself or wondering “why am I like this?” The narrative of self can then be, “I am a stress-sensitive person that needs be aware my thoughts and external stressors and try to support and care for my body when it’s under stress”, rather than “I am an anxious person who feels worried all the time and can’t cope.” The use of more biologically based, self-accepting language can make a huge difference in how the somatic sensations are perceived or appraised, and therefore, make a huge difference in how they are experienced psychologically and emotionally.