Fragile

Why we are feeling more stressed, anxious and overwhelmed than ever (and what we can do about it)

Stella O'Malley

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780717183241
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Self Improvement

Have we reached a point where anxiety is so common we consider it 'normal'? In this exploration of the rising anxiety epidemic, psychotherapist and bestselling author Stella O'Malley delves into why we are feeling more anxious, stressed and overwhelmed than ever.

From looking at how our increasingly perfectionist and materialistic society is causing us to value all the wrong things, to practical tips for uncovering the roots of anxiety and strategies to ease it, this book is an essential tool for building resilience to stress.

Anyone can experience anxiety at any time. Fragile arms us with the skills to move forward to a place where we can experience challenges to our mental health and feel adequately empowered to address them, allowing us to live calmer, more satisfying lives.

PART 1

HOW ANXIETY IMPACTS YOU

CHAPTER 1

How anxiety works

‘The mind is its own place and in itself

Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.’

JOHN MILTON

Anxiety has been described as an over-estimation of danger combined with an under-estimation of our ability to cope. Usually the danger isn’t so threatening and usually we will cope better than we imagine, but that’s not how anxious minds work. Over-thinking, over-feeling and over-reacting are daily challenges for too many people because anxiety takes over and leads us to dismiss logical thinking and run with our emotional minds. Anxiety leads us to feel overwhelmed, it tramples on our wellbeing and consumes our minds with obsessive thoughts that we just can’t close down.

But most people who crack up do it silently; most of their struggle is internal and most of their pain is turned inwards, which is why most people blame themselves instead of today’s anxiety-inducing lifestyles. The problem is that we don’t know when our friends and neighbours are cracking up, so everyone tends to think that their tension is a personal failing instead of a destructive trend in our society. I know that feeling anxious and stressed is an increasingly common complaint because as a psychotherapist I meet the clients who blame themselves instead of blaming the toxic level of pressure that is foisted upon them. It’s clear to anyone who is working as a mental health professional that it is our toxic society rather than the individual that is causing most of the strain; we – the mental health professionals – all witness the destruction that society is wreaking on our mental wellbeing. But most people don’t work in the mental health industry, so most people don’t have the information to hand to see that stress, anxiety and feeling overwhelmed has become part of an enormously growing pattern that is happening to everyone.

Whether you have been diagnosed with anxiety or even if you just know you are feeling more anxious and overwhelmed than you’d like to be, this book should bring about more self-awareness so you can learn to spot what works best for you and what makes everything worse. If you are to free yourself from feeling tense and fearful, you will need to unpick the source of your tension so that you can counteract the underlying sense of anxiety and unease that is slowly growing within you and steadily becoming more unmanageable.

The challenge for people who experience anxiety is that they need to learn to live with it. Alcoholics can give up alcohol and cigarette smokers can give up tobacco but people with anxiety can’t give up anxiety; just like the anorexic who has to learn to eat again, the anxious person needs to learn to live with anxiety. You can, however, reduce the intensity, the timespan and the impact of your anxiety. If these three elements can be significantly reduced, then it is usually enough for the anxious person to live a free and easy life unrestrained by the terrible gnawing anxiety that was previously making them miserable.

ARE WE ALL ‘FEELING ANXIOUS’?

According to the latest research, we in the West are living through an unprecedented epidemic of anxiety with up to 33.7 per cent of the population affected by an anxiety disorder at some stage during the course of their lives.² The familiar tightness, tension and fear that grips us is being experienced by so many people that we are starting to believe that we should be accustomed to living with a chronically constricted spirit.

As we will see in Chapters 4, 5 and 6, the main reason for all this anxiety and stress is that our lifestyles are too demanding and our coping mechanisms are often deeply flawed. Society is going too fast; we’re doing too much, consuming too much and asking too much of our minds and bodies. When we do too much we weaken and become too tired and anxious to feel satisfied so we search for the nearest short-term strategy that is close to hand – perhaps we drink too much wine in an effort to relax but then have to suffer the consequences of that particular short-term strategy. Or perhaps we avoid the source of our anxiety and by doing that, as we will soon see, we make the anxiety worse.

Anxiety makes you feel as if your brain is on fire, acid is burning in your stomach and you become completely consumed with obsessive thoughts that you just can’t close down. The only truly helpful approach is to learn about the patterns of your anxiety, so that you can understand clearly what works best for you and what doesn’t work and, ultimately, you learn to live a more satisfying and less stress-inducing lifestyle.

THE ANXIETY CHECKLIST

Read the following checklist³ and answer whether you experience these sensations or thoughts.

DO YOU:

… feel jumpy or jittery?

… have trembling or shaky hands or limbs?

… feel like a tight band is tied around your forehead?

… have a tightness in your chest or in the pit of your stomach?

… feel sweaty or clammy? Or have tingly, cold or clammy hands or fingers?

… have a dry mouth?

… have difficulties with your breathing?

… have difficulties talking? Or have an unsteady voice?

… have a racing heart or a sensation of your heart pounding or skipping a beat?

… experience difficulty swallowing or feel like you have a lump in your throat?

… feel like you’re choking or smothering?

… have digestive problems such an upset stomach, nausea or diarrhoea?

… need to pee more frequently than usual?

… cling to others for security?

… use alcohol or medication to calm down?

… avoid particular situations because they fill you with dread?

… become agitated for no apparent reason?

DO YOU:

… worry too much?

… think you’re about to lose control?

… feel filled with a sense of dread that something terrible is going to happen?

… feel intensely impatient, intolerant or irritable?

… lack patience?

… procrastinate endlessly?

… need endless reassurance?

… become preoccupied with what’s happening to your body?

… feel overwhelmed and unable to cope?

… feel like everything is going too fast?

… feel like the world is caving in on you? Or feel like the walls are closing in on you?

… become obsessed with tiny little details?

… have difficulty shaking off nagging, intrusive thoughts that don’t seem to leave you alone?

… think you are seriously ill but know that the doctors disagree with you?

… have difficulty concentrating or maintaining your attention?

… worry that you are going to be all alone?

The more you can identify with the above feelings and behaviour, the more likely you are to be experiencing anxiety. Anxiety disorder is a serious ailment and it is essential for every person who believes they are suffering from this to go to their doctor first to ensure they receive proper medical treatment. Although more and more people are feeling stressed and anxious these days, some types of personalities are more prone to feeling anxious than others, but, as we will see in the next chapter, just because you are more sensitive and highly reactive than others doesn’t mean you are condemned to a lifetime filled with stress and anxiety.

HOW ANXIETY IS TRIGGERED

The science of the brain is terrifyingly complex and, on the assumption that most readers aren’t neuroscientists, I have simplified the descriptions in this book to make it more relatable and readable.

The amygdalae are two almond-shaped groups of nuclei which are located deep within the limbic system in our brain. The limbic system is often referred to as our ‘emotional brain’ and research shows that the amygdala performs a crucial role in processing our emotional responses.⁴

Another part of our brain, the cortex, is often described as the thinking, wiser brain as it is designed for higher thought processes. The amygdala keeps us alive in an emergency, while the cortex makes life interesting. Our wise brain is slow-moving, reflective, unsure, intelligent and wise. By contrast, our emotional brain is fast, furious, dramatic, not so wise and often a little bit thick.

When a person’s brain gets a signal of danger, the amygdala within the emotional brain is triggered. This trigger, also known as the fight-or-flight response, is necessary because we need to be able to react to danger immediately and powerfully. (Some people believe that ‘flight, fight, freeze or appease’ is a more accurate description of this response.) However, we humans have evolved from a very different world from the one we inhabit today. When the world was full of predators, our main job was to get enough to eat without being eaten. The amygdala governed our survival instinct and it served as an emergency alert system to keep alert to the danger of passing lions and tigers and bears.

The psychologist Daniel Goleman coined the phrase ‘amygdala hijack’ in his 1996 book Emotional Intelligence:Why it can matter more than IQ to describe the immediate and overwhelming power of the amygdala when it has been triggered. When it is triggered, the amygdala turns into an emergency first responder and shuts down the more rational parts of the brain. With that, any hope of reason or logic flies out of the window. The amygdala works quickly – because speed is of the essence in an emergency; and it has no conscious awareness – because this is exactly when you have no time to think. The amygdala is also very powerful because we need to act with full commitment when we are faced with danger. Many people feel as if they are out of control when they are experiencing ‘amygdala hijack’, even though they are in fact being controlled by this tiny part of the brain. It is only in hindsight that we can see the impact of the amygdala on our decision-making – for instance, when we quickly pull a child back from walking in front of an oncoming car, it is the amygdala that totally controls the situation and propels us to action.

The pr...