How To Stop the Anxiety Loop

I am writing this blog based on my own experience. However, I know that the human experiences is shared. Hopefully, what I write about you can relate to and in some way what has helped me can also be of some help to you. I am not an authority on the subject of mental health in any way. I understand that people may have learned different ways to get healthier emotionally. What helped me may not work for everyone. But hopefully, there is something that you can glean from my experience.

My biggest challenge over the years has been the fact that I’ve always had a worry theme. The theme is a topic that is of concern to me and whenever I didn’t feel good, or felt insecure or anxious I would go back to that topic of concern and worry about it. I would try to “problem solve” in my head and eliminate the negative feelings associated with those thoughts through trying to correct the thoughts, trying to look at things from a different perspective, re-examining my feelings and just generally do everything I can to distance myself from the fear, pain and anxiety. The problem is I never succeeded. The more I tried the more entrenched the anxiety loop became until I became completely consumed by my own thoughts. I was inside my head all the time. Pretty hard to enjoy life when that is going on eh? Sound familiar?

Table of Contents

Addressing the Real Cause

It was not until I began to address the real cause of my pain that things began to improve.¹ I looked back on my life and realized that the anxiety really began to pick up after my father had unexpectedly passed away.² His death was such a shock that I never really properly addressed it. I was preoccupied with teenage problems and was unable to deal with the grief that overwhelmed me. I was in the midst of growing up.³

I know that this is most likely a common thing. People can be impacted with traumatic events that they are unprepared to deal with. They react as I did by numbing out, shutting down, worrying, and staying busy. Some people react by self-medicating in some way. They no longer can really feel what they feel and know what they know.⁴ They loose contact with themselves and as a result suffer even more than before. We are all on a spectrum. Some people react by partially addressing the event(s). Others receive more support from others. Others completely avoid the situation and their feelings all together. They “white knuckle” the whole thing. The point is that not dealing with things properly or sufficiently is common.

Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms

By not addressing what has happened and our own difficult feelings, we can begin to develop unhealthy coping mechanisms.⁵ This is because the feelings we suppress never go away, they just get expressed in an unhealthy way. That is what happened to me. I would say to an extent I was already practicing before the catastrophe happened. I was dealing with teenage issues but instead of telling someone about what I was going through I kept it all inside. I worried a lot. I did not address what I was feeling. The stage was set for when something really bad happened. My father’s unexpected passing. After that happened I just double downed on what I had already been doing. Which was really unhealthy.

Things did not change until I addressed the grief surrounding my fathers death. When your trying to figure out why you feel so bad, why you have what looks like OCD, GAD or another anxiety diagnoses, its good to first objectively address the elephant in the room.⁶ What is the biggest tragedy that has happened to you? Did someone you love and depend on pass away? Did you go through your parents separating or divorcing, upheaval in the home etc. Were you abused in some way, or witness abuse? It could be one event or an ongoing stressful event that you kept having to cope with for some time. Of course war and other horrific experiences would have a huge impact but so can more seemingly minor experiences if not addressed sufficiently. These experiences matter. Your emotional reaction is normal. So in a nutshell we need to look back and even though we may feel what happened was “not a big deal” or “its in the past” or “I dealt with that”, we can be wrong. We may be still dealing with those emotions today and not know it.⁷

Express Yourself

As I began to work through the grief. As I began to talk about, cry about, and write about how I felt about what happened, things began to change. I began to feel better. I began to feel less numbed out better able to feel what I was feeling. This took a lot of work. At first it felt almost manual, like I had to force myself to address those feelings. As time went on it became easier. It began to feel more natural. I also began to notice that my need to “run” in my head began to subside. The time I was spending going around on the worry wheel began to decrease. I began to have more and more periods of living in the moment. I also began to feel my pain and suffering more acutely which was unpleasant, but it meant that I was less numbed out and more in tune with what I was feeling. Feeling more pain was ok because feeling my feelings meant that my anxiety in social situations and my being triggered began to lessen in intensity. I felt more in control.⁸

Change Unhealthy Thought Patterns

The most challenging thing I faced was unlearning those unhelpful thought patterns that had become so automatic. I could mindfully observe that it was the pain and distressing feelings that were driving the obsessions.⁹ I learned to “put the brakes” on worry, which forced me to sit with those difficult feelings.¹⁰ Sometimes it felt impossible to do this, but as time went on it became easier. With each success I got stronger emotionally. I wouldn’t just force myself not to obsess, not to worry, not to do mental compulsions with that being the limit of what I needed to do. No, I would also center on those difficult feelings like the crushing sadness that was driving the anxiety. I would then express those difficult feelings and get them out. I learned that for me whenever I felt anxiety, what I was feeling was a secondary emotion, the primary one being sadness.¹¹

I know that everyone’s experience is different. Some people have gone through far worse than me. Some have suffered less. The point is that we all face similar challenges. Coping with pain and suffering. We all have to learn to deal with it. With our own personal private pain. However, sometimes its good to not be too private. Expressing how we feel is essential to our mental and emotional well being.¹² This has been the case for a long time. Times have changed but people are probably pretty much the same as they were thousands of years ago. They needed to express how they felt and doing so helped them feel better. We are no different, we are built the same way they were. The famous writer Shakespeare put it this way “Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o-er wrought heart and bids it break.” So find a friend to talk to, pray, express yourself, write about, listen or play music. Give sorrow words and see if you gradually begin to feel better.