Anxiety
Fear and worry are painful but necessary emotions. Fear enables us to respond rapidly to a threat, and worry helps us anticipate and prepare for future dangers. Because these emotions are so strong, they tend to stay around long after they are useful. Instead of relaxing completely after a stressful event, we tend to settle back into that state of habitual, low-level arousal that we call anxiety.
We can regard anxiety as maladaptive, toxic fear. Fear and worry are helpful: they are focused on likely dangers and problems. Anxiety, however, is directed indiscriminately towards everything. Fear sharpens the mind and heightens our perceptions. Anxiety just makes us agitated and confused, feeling bad and not knowing what to do about it. Fear is short-lasting and worry should come and go according to circumstances, but anxiety can stay for a lifetime.
About 10-20% of the population are likely to be suffering from anxiety at any one time, and it is a common component of other maladies. People with free-floating anxiety are often diagnosed as having a Generalised Anxiety Disorder. About a quarter of such people will also face the horror of panic attacks. These sudden eruptions of paralytic fear can occur without any trigger, and are often mistaken for heart attacks.
Many anxious people develop phobias. They fixate their fears on particular stimuli, and organise their lives to avoid them. Others will develop Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder and fixate on time-consuming preventative rituals to stay in control. Anxiety also tends to be the precursor to, and a common component of, both depression and schizophrenia.
Although fear seems to be instinctive, it is actually a learnt response. Babies aren't born with the full complement of emotions. Fear comes at about six months. Anger at around twelve months. Shame takes two years. This is good news. Because fear is learnt, it can be unlearnt, or new patterns learnt around it. Meditation as a stress management tool is very much about winding back and retraining the fear response. To do this, it is useful to understand how fear works in the brain.
THE NEUROLOGY OF FEAR
Fear occurs as an interaction between three brain regions. These are the frontal cortex where thinking occurs, the sensory cortex where sensing occurs, and the limbic system where emotions occur. The word 'cortex' means 'skin'. It refers to the top few millimeters of the brain. Thinking occurs exactly where we would expect it to, behind our foreheads in the frontal cortex. Sensing occurs in specialised regions throughout the rest of the cortex.
Our emotions occur in the centre of the brain, in a region loosely called the limbic system. This is where we find the amygdala which determines the strength of any emotional response, and the hypothalamus which both initiates and winds back that response.
When the sensory cortex notices a potential danger it sends the information simultaneously to the amygdala and to the frontal cortex. The amygdala processes the data rapidly and crudely. The frontal cortex processes it slowly and more accurately.
The amygdala makes a 'quick and dirty' approximate assessment such as "This could be a snake!" Within a third of a second, it has triggered off a fight-or-flight response via the hypothalamus just in case. This makes good biological sense. A mouse that bolts at the possibility of a predator will survive longer than one that hangs around until it's sure.
There is no way we can avoid this initial blind impulse. Emotion always starts as a fast, automatic over-reaction. At the same time, however, the thinking brain is making its own more accurate assessment. It takes a good second to verify the details (for example, whether it really is a snake) and to consider the options.
Since the situation is rarely as bad as the amygdala assumes it to be, the thinking brain winds back the stress response that is already underway to a more appropriate level. The final behavioural outcome results from this cross-talk between thought and emotion. Thought alone can't decide what to do. Emotions often get it wrong, but they do give us our value judgements and our drive. We need them both.
Thought and emotion are natural antagonists, so another part of the brain called the Anterior Cingulate negotiates between them. The Anterior Cingulate can see the big picture. It is the home of what we can call self-awareness. It monitors everything that is going on and fine tunes thought, emotion and behaviour for the best outcome.
Because our emotions operate by impulse, we have surprisingly little direct awareness of them. We are more likely to notice stress in terms of its bodily or mental effects. In another article, I explain how stress affects the body. In this article I will explain how it affects the mind.
THE HALLMARKS OF ANXIETY
Anxiety typically leads to an overactive, runaway mind. Our thoughts take over. We can't stop them or direct them. We over-react to everything indiscriminately. A clear sign of stress is that even small problems feel like crises. Even when we are exhausted, the mind doesn't give up and its incessant chatter can keep us awake at night.
Anxiety increases the rate at which we burn energy. We first feel charged up, but once we burn through our reserves, we become exhausted. This means that we can feel anxiety both as high-energy agitation, or as low-energy lethargy and confusion.
In the high energy state, the mind is too fast. It moves too rapidly from one thought to another. It is easily distracted and can't concentrate. It constantly scans for danger or advantage. It jumps from one thought to another on impulse, without reflection. It spends too little time with any one issue to think about it productively.
It is good to realise that shifting attention at any time is an expensive activity. We lose energy and a few seconds each time we shift focus and have to adjust to another thought or action. Multitasking is one of the most wasteful and unproductive activities we can attempt to do. For mental efficiency it is so much better to slow down, pay attention and keep the thought-switching to a minimum. If the mind is too speedy, we leave behind a trail of unfinished, ill-digested activity and often have to return to patch up afterwards.
In the low energy state, the mind gets too tired to focus at all. It drifts uncontrollably from one thought to another, at the mercy of any distraction, or it defaults to its habitual worries. It can't follow a train of thought productively, and often just spaces out.
When we are tired, we can still function and apparently get through the day. However, we are usually not alert enough, or sufficiently tuned in, to evaluate what we are doing, or to remember in any detail what we've done. This combination of low energy, scattered attention, poor performance and poor recall can make us feel we are not coping well at all. This is how habitual anxiety, the high energy state, often leads inexorably into depression, the low energy state.
HOW MEDITATION CAN HELP
There are three main ways in which meditation helps with anxiety and the overactive mind. It relaxes the body; it shifts our attention away from thought into the sensory present; and it slows down and objectifies those thoughts that remain. It does this through the three skills I've described in the article on meditation, namely relaxation, focusing and self-awareness.
Relaxation counteracts emotion. The purpose of emotion is to fire up the body for immediate action. Relaxation defuses this muscular tension and overarousal. Even a few deep breaths are quite enough to start the process, and may even be sufficient to stop a panic attack. Within a minute or so, the body is no longer primed to shoot first and ask questions later. You're no longer over-reacting, or indeed, reacting at all. The emotional charge fades and the thoughts lose their driving urgency.
We can't draw any clear line between physical stress and anxiety. One relates to the body and the other to the mind, but they are virtually the same thing. As a consequence, what relieves physical stress will also relieve anxiety. There are purely mental strategies for anxiety such as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, but they work so much better if they also involve physical relaxation.
Focusing calms the overactive mind in a different way. To focus means to give one thing priority at the expense of everything else: we feed X by starving Y. Our thoughts usually run along automatically if left to themselves. If we deliberately focus on the body however, we drain energy away from that habitual process. The weakest thoughts will vanish. Any thoughts that remain will become weaker and more controllable. This alone is often an enormous relief to an anxious person.
Finally, awareness or mindfulness helps us see out thoughts objectively and in perspective. Meditation makes a clear distinction between noticing a thought and responding to it, and for many people this is a revelation. We have no choice about noticing a thought when it arises, but we don't have to engage it in conversation. We can stop a thought in its tracks, evaluate it and decide whether to stay with it or not. If a thought won't go away, we can at least quarantine it, and relax anyway. This is very similar to the psychological strategy of stopping a thought, putting it into a statement and then reframing it.
