Anxiety

Stress, stress, it seems we are all stressed out. Well, there is something we can do to shed unneeded stress. And the good news is it’s something we are already doing.

We live in paradoxical times. We are physically safe by any historical standard. Very few of us will encounter any situation where we are apt to be injured or killed. We are so safe there is a whole market selling domesticated danger: skydiving, extreme parkour, stupid hold my beer nonsense. It seems many of us need more danger on a biological level than society provides us with. Yet as we become safer our collective anxiety seems to be rising. We have social anxiety, financial anxiety, existential anxiety. Name any facet of reality and we seem to have anxiety around it.

And why wouldn’t we? Anxiety is an evolutionary gift that gives us the ability to think about the what-ifs of any situation. It's the price we pay for not having to physically test out the ideas we have, to have a guess as to the outcome of those ideas. We can simply think about whatever our idea is and decide whether we should scratch it or try to turn it into a reality.

That said if we have too much anxiety we can easily get stuck in our thoughts. There a balance that must be honored. So why are so many of us unbalanced in regards to anxiety. When we look at the hardships people have endured through history it would follow that we humans would consider most of the modern world safe by comparisons. How could the same species who survived, wars, famines, genocides, be at all stressed by traffic, finances, and internet clatter. It would be like Penguins, a few penguin generations from now being cold on a cool summer night that dips down in the mid-fifties. It makes no sense. 

Unlike temperature regulation though anxiety is not caused by external factors. Anxiety is an emotion, a subjective and instinctual understanding of a particular hormonal cocktail we can make. Despite how erratic the world gets around us, we can work to control our anxiety like any other emotion.  External stressors may spark our anxiety but we have a choice as to how much and how long we feed this state of mind.

So how can we modulate our anxiety? My best answer to this is cliched but also steeped in many traditions. It is simply breath. I’m certainly not the first who understands breath is how we adjust the volume on our anxiety. As common as this knowledge is I feel it's an under-practiced component of self-mastery. Maybe that's why there seems to be increasing anxiety in a society that seemingly is becoming increasingly safer. 

To get a bit more specific in this let's focus on our vagus nerve. The vagus nerve is a meandering “vagabond (it's namesake) of a nerve that's composed mostly of afferent or sensory nerve cells. It sends feedback information from the lungs, heart, and digestive tract to our brains. If some aspect of this nerve senses stress then it will send that information to our brain. Our brain is at liberty to concoct any story that may or may not be helpful as to why we are stressed. 

One way we can send signals of reassurance to our brain from our vagus nerve is to breathe deeper. When we breathe into our diaphragm we expand our bellies and push our ribs out to the sides. By physically expanding ourselves in this way our diaphragm puts pressure on our vagus nerve, which sends signals to our brain that according to our breath we are in a relaxed state. Regardless of the chaos that may be going around us, our brains are receiving data points that we are safe. 

In almost all external situation we find ourselves in we are better served by getting leaving our anxiety loops as soon as possible. We are better at critically thinking about our problems when we are clear and calm rather than anxious, For this reason, I recommend spending some time each day in practicing deep breathing. There are dozens of muscle groups that directly and indirectly relate to our breathing. Our muscles get into groove easily. For the same reason, we never unlearn how to ride a bike, our breathing pattern during times of stress will fall into whatever default modes of breath breathing we established up to that point. If we practice deeper breathing then when we undergo stress that will be our default pattern. We will naturally find ourselves in a calmer state of mind and be less anxious.

Anthony Bruni