Hi, this is Sharon. Everywhere I teach people describe how the mounting anxiety is a modern life exhausts them. They want help to remain calm and confident amid so much danger, real and perceived. My dear friend Silvia Borstein once described anxiety as a free floating hyperactivity of the mind. I would add that anxiety doesn't just float, it intensifies, building one conjecture upon the next. It can be very harsh. He might even feel anxious about having anxiety, and it gets stronger. A friend sent me an old Peanuts cartoon of Charlie Brown sitting up in bed in the middle of the night saying, my anxieties have anxieties that captures the proliferation of anxieties perfectly. 

Everyone feels some anxiety at times. If I ask participants in my seminars who among them suffers from anxiety, almost every hand goes up. In one way, anxiety is essential to live. We need a few basics to survive food, water and shelter. sustaining those three essentials requires vigilance and anxiety accelerates you. heightens awareness focuses the senses, and alerts the reflexes. These are all aroused because of a genuine threat. They form a particular intelligence and response to fear. But when those senses are piqued by imaginary threats, we become consumed by anxiety. 

So the first step in coping is to learn to distinguish anxiety from realistic fear. Fear is immediate, a threat right in front of you, that requires a swift response. Sylvia's example is finding yourself driving through a blinding snowstorm that prevents you from seeing even a few feet ahead, without needing to thank all your senses focus, so that you can respond in a way that ensures your survival and that of the other people in the car. 

On the other hand, Sylvia said, If I found my son, he doesn't answer that means he must be dead. Now, she continued, that could be 1000 reasons. He's not answering the phone. He's in the shower. He fell in love. He's sleeping. But my mind goes to the worst extrapolation of that. And so her eyes widened and her heart raced as she escalated into a state of hyper alertness.

Even though all of this was taking place in her imagination. The fact that anxiety grips the body in the same way as fear gives anxiety more credibility than it deserves. When your body reacts this way, it believes anxiety is alerting you to a genuine threat. And when the brain is spinning at one horrifying outcome after another, it doesn't have enough space to clearly perceive the world around us as it is in this moment. 

So first step, start by taking a breath or two to ground yourself so that you can determine if the threat you feel is real, or just a conjecture from circumstances. Is this a real threat? Or is this happening in my mind? Don't try to forcefully calm yourself down. That's too much. Just try to determine if this is a real fear or an anxious conjecture. Next, once you know that what you feel is anxiety, consider an antidote. One of my favorites is to cultivate some loving kindness for yourself. Both the chant like nature of that practice and the generation of loving kindness will help.

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