Photo by Rene Böhmer on Unsplash
One of the biggest challenges I deal with right now is with anxiety. I hesitate to say this out loud. Not because of any great shame, but because it makes it sound like I’m a ticking time ball of anxiety.
People associate anxiety with the idea that basic tasks create crazy anxiety, and that therefore I must spend all my time ruminating over the minutae.
In reality, I move through life fairly calm. Anxiety isn’t something I fear or avoid, if anything, I think I deal with anxiety better than most. But then how do I explain the fact that I regularly awake within a state of tension? Even this morning I awoke with a sense that someone had their foot on my throat.
This is a misunderstanding of anxiety, or at least the anxiety I am dealing with. Daily anxieties have become so normalised that it’s assumed to be the only way that anxiety is experienced. So when people hear me say anxiety, they assume that I’m caught up around daily stress and worries.
And of course, like anyone, I do have my fair share of these typical anxieties. Most of it is around body pains and difficulty eating. I do what I can with these, but honestly I’m not sure there’s much else than simply managing them right now.
Then there’s the general anxiety of living in the world right now. A few moments ago I saw a video of the French police beating up a black teenager for having pharmacy serum in his bag. I think it would be quite inhumane to not have some level of reaction to that.
I do try not to get too caught up in online videos. But I also am someone who has lived a career in politics, with a lot of political friends across several nations. It’s not something I want to change, but the unfortunate consequence is that I’m seeing a lot of negative news across the world. There’s been violent suppression of demonstrations in Delhi, Brussels and Paris, and a critical Brazilian election coming up too. These are all images I have seen within the last 24 hours.
The world is in pain. And as someone who is well connected and politically attune, I feel it. But I also know that if I were to feel nothing, then I would not be experiencing what it is to be human.
But these anxieties have not been the source of my sickness. Awaking from sleep with physical tension is not coming from any of this. I am not spending my nights worrying about the world. Honestly, I have a far healthier relationship with dealing with these worries than most people in my political circles.
The deeper anxiety often comes after intense dreaming or restless sleep. Even last night I had a dream that involved a mixture of idstant family and close relatives, with an undercurrent of tension. This all took place in a house that I lived in 15 years ago.
My best summation is that I’ve seemingly accumulated years of unprocessed emotions, and currently that’s what I think my body is working through. I heard someone once say that the amount of time it takes to get over a break up is about half the time a relationship lasted. I’m not totally convinced by this, but I think it gives at least a ball park figure. So if we’re talking of around say 10 years worth of unprocessed emotions, then it would take about five years to process through it all.
The number is pretty arbitrary, but what is helpful about it is that it illustrates how much time is actually needed to process deeper rooted emotions. It can genuinely take years, and that’s only if you have enough space to deal with them. If you’re piling up even more anxieties every-day, then all you are really doing is pouring water out of a bath with a cup while the tap is still running.
Breathing exercises and meditation can be helpful for people. But a 15 minute exercise can only calm down the nervous system as it is, it’s not going to do actual deeper processing. The reason I’m not doing longer yoga exercises right now is that if I were to do a genuinely deeper session, it would open up a whole lot of past anxieties which would be so intense I would be wiped out for a few days. Rather than leaving calmer and more peaceful as many people in a class would, I would probably be closer to a panic attack.
Right now, I guess I’m choosing to embrace the anxiety. My hope that is if I’m feeling it now, then that means it is coming out, slowly but surely. Even if it is boring and really rather miserable, being able to withdraw from the world long enough to process this all is a privilege.
In the grand scheme of things, having five years of processing these emotions means spending another fifty light and free.