Feeling boxed in?

It’s probably no surprise to you to think about how today’s world is demanding and stressful. Technology offers an astonishing 24/7 capacity for connection. Connection to the internet, to friends and family, to work and co-workers, to endless means of distraction. It’s no wonder that many of us struggle to balance our responses to this bombardment.

Some of us have a central nervous system calibrated on a higher frequency. The experience can be like being constantly reactive to all stimulas or cues from the environment. With cell phones, texts, emails, instant messaging, social networking “tweets” etc. this bombardment can be relentless. For those in this catagory when juggling the amount of the data input, plus attempts to respond, they’ll often experience overwhelm, even anxiety.

Anxiety is an emotional and mental state, accompanied by a  variety of  bodily sensations including common ones such as the heart thumping, tightness in the chest,  shallow breathing, maybe  the stomach in knotts.

Subjectively, the experiences may range from a slight uneasiness to full blown panic attack.

There may be altered breathing that alerts you to its presence – noticing that your breathing is short, tight, caught up in the throat or chest. Alternatively, a relaxed breath indicating the absence of anxiety may have longer cycles, softer, more flowing with an awareness of it originating in the belly, not the restricted chest or throat.

Emotional experiences that may predict anxiety are if you find yourself frequently experiencing fears or worries. The degree, frequency and intensity that you find yourself dealing with those states are key.

Every human being experiences worry or feeling fearful at some time in their life. But for some poeple it feels ever present, dominating their experience. Such people may describe themselves as “being a worry-wort”, or “often fearful”, or noticing they are “feeling too scared to do much of anything”.

Anxiety is trigged by our  ’fight or flight’ mechanism. This is an evolutionary hold-over. It’s no longer wooly mammoths that set it off. And it’s not just if nowadays a bus comes careening towards us, life-saving as it is to be able to react speedily and avoid a potential fatal accident.
In today’s tech-savvy wired world, our constant need to respond, or more accurately react, to whenever we are called, texted, emailed, or simply need to not have a void, conditions us to become numb to the constant experience of being  anxious, even mildly so. If we become numb to the presence of anxiety, we loose the ability to respond to it, or ponder what it’s trying to tell us. It then can move into the ‘driver’s seat’ in our life.

When anxiety is driving, our lives becomes limiting, constricted, smaller. Over time there are less and less ways to keep us within our comfort zone. Simultaneously the list of  what can provoke worry, or fear grows. These emotions in and of themselves become something to move away from too. It’s just too uncomfortable for most people to stay with the experience of feeling fear or worry.

For those who are courageous enough to do so, by paying deep attention, and having the curiosity to inquire into the feeling can learn much about themselves and the nature of the emotion.

This is a liberating, even novel way to respond. Mostly, our minds just want to distance from such an experience. But then we don’t learn how to respond skillfully. By allowing our curiosity to inquire into what’s really, accurately going on in that moment, by being more mindful, we learn much about anxiety, in addititon to adding to self-knowledge.

Bringing mindfulness to the moment helps anxiety to fade away. Anxiety is about the future mostly. That which hasn’t yet happened, and often never will! Staying with what is happening in the present reminds us to not let this emotion rule our lives, and exclude the present moment from awareness.

It can liberate you from the tyranny of the fear-driven, shrinking, worry-filled life. Instead, you can experience a peace of mind that is spacious, and calm.

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