Anxiety is a part of life. When anxiety is high, the part of our brain that helps with thoughtful responses begins to shut down enabling the reactionary part of the brain.
This is a wonderful response in the midst of danger, or acute anxiety. For example, imagine you are crossing the street and a car is speeding towards you. In this moment, we have an automatic reaction that kicks in: Get the heck out of the way! There is no need or time to process or understand the situation better we simply must react.
There is another form of anxiety however, called chronic anxiety. Chronic anxiety is a constant, ongoing sense of threat that is either real or imagined. Chronic anxiety exists in the background and is out of our awareness. We all just live with our chronic anxiety until something happens that triggers it. Often our chronic anxiety is tied to an event or events that occurred early in life. We made the events mean something about us and our worthiness and we developed defensive routines to protect ourselves from being hurt again, The problem is that as an adult, situations that pose no real threat may trigger the reaction we learned earlier in life.
Our goal is not to eliminate anxiety but to learn to manage self in the midst of anxiety. This begins by learning to recognize our reactions to anxiety. As we hone this skill we gain the ability to see anxiety at work in ourselves and in the group. When we do this, we have a better chance of thinking through our responses, based on our guiding principles, rather than simply reacting to our anxiety.
Our body gives us signs letting us know that our anxiety is rising. These signs can be things like sweaty palms, a racing heart, a knot in the stomach or muscles tensing up. These are good early indicators that our anxiety level is rising.
Aside from the physiological reactions, anxiety typically shows up in four ways. As we become more familiar with these four ways of coping, we can learn to be aware of the presence of anxiety in a situation.
Here is a brief overview of the four reactions.
Recognizing Your Reactivity To Anxiety
- Conflict: Win/lose or right/wrong thinking. This can show itself in an all-or-nothing mentality. Conflict can be as mild as persuasion or as extreme as physical fighting.
- Distance: Withdrawal from the group physically or emotionally. Distancing may keep the relationship peaceful. but will inevitably make it superficial. An extreme expression of distancing is to completely cut people and/or things out.
- Overfunction/Underfunction: Encouraging or allowing one person to take responsibility for the entire system or group. Overfunctioning happens when one person takes on more responsibility than what is reasonably theirs and underfunctioning happens when someone takes on less responsibility than is reasonably theirs.
- Triangling: This happens when someone avoids taking personal responsibility by blaming someone or something else. This can also show up when we bring people that have nothing to do with the problem into the situation.
We will be expanding on each response in our upcoming series “Recognize Your Response to Anxiety,” so stay tuned!
image credit: Lau_Lau Chan
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