Anxiety Is a Coping Mechanism

Anxiety is modern society’s bread and butter.

Social conditioning is the only reason anxiety is rampant in the first place. We’re conditioned to be anxious.

If we had a bunch of psychiatrists rummaging around everyone’s psyches, most people could be diagnosed with some form of anxiety disorder. Personally, I’m not a fan of pathologizing the human experience, no matter how “extreme,” or “outside the norm” it seems.

Yes, most of us are insane to some degree. That’s not as dramatic as it sounds because insanity is the norm.

Insanity looks a lot like sanity only because true sanity is so rare. And that’s also why sanity is easily judged as insanity because it’s so different from the norm.

So in some sense, we can say that the inner journey is a journey from insanity to sanity.

One of the hallmarks of insanity is a constant persistent anxiety about imaginary events. But even if you’re in the grip of anxiety right now, no need to despair.

Anxiety is like a growling shadow — it’s only scary so long as you have no light. The moment you shine your flashlight on it, you see that there is nothing there and that the growling is your stomach because you’re hungry.

A Vicious Cycle

You might feel anxious about not having enough money. That’s an experience many of us can relate to in some form or another.

So far so good. But what is it you’re actually anxious about?

“About not having enough money, becoming a street bum, living a miserable life, and starving to death,” you might say.

Quite dramatic today, are we?

But okay, fair enough. You don’t want your meals to be dumpsteresque. Understandable.

On the other hand, we can all acknowledge that worst-case scenarios usually remain just that — scenarios. In the few cases where the worst-case scenarios do come true, well, shit happened. But even such events are often not the end, and in those cases where it does seem to be the end, even then we don’t know.

Anyhow, let’s say you’re afraid of, what you consider to be, the worst-case scenario.

Accept that. That’s what’s present right now and there is no use in fighting it or pretending it away.

The reflex is to try to look away. We feel fear and then try to identify what causes that fear not to face it but to avoid it.

The problem with anxiety, however, is that when you wear your anxiety glasses everything looks like a reason to be anxious. But anxiety’s source is not outside of you.

By trying to avoid anxiety, we focus on the events in our lives. But because we feel anxious, all these events are painted with an anxious color which in turn just exacerbates the anxiety.

A vicious cycle.

Anxiety grows into an intimidating nameless formless something only as long as you refuse to look at it directly. When you look at it directly it deflates like a startled balloon.

Now the tricky part for most people is that they don’t know where or what to look at. If I’m not supposed to find the culprit in the world, then where do I find it?

Good question.

First, let’s acknowledge some generalities about anxiety.

Anxiety Isn’t Real

Anxiety is always a response to imagination.

Yes, always. I mean it.

If you’d be standing before a teeth-bearing, ready-to-pounce tiger you’d hardly feel anxious. You’d feel a visceral sense of fear because there is a real threat to your life.

How often is there a real physical threat to your life?

If you’re reading this, I’d say not often. But you might feel anxious every day.

And why do many of us feel so anxious? Because we imagine negative outcomes all day long.

Some people feel offended when they’re told that the anxiety they’ve been struggling with is not because of the big bad world but because their minds have developed the habit of worrying.

Usually, we feel justified in our anxiety. We believe we have every reason to feel anxious.

Sure, generally speaking, an unemployed, broke, single parent of three children has more reason to be anxious than a retired Billionaire.

But blaming circumstances in our lives for how we feel and using them as reasons why change is impossible, helps no one. Such an approach to life is perfectly disempowering and keeps people stuck physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Besides, I’m sure there are plenty of well-off humans riddled with anxiety. Having good circumstances isn’t necessarily a safeguard for inner peace.

Again, yes, you are where you are right now. Accept that. Your experience is valid. It’s valid because you’re having it.

But that doesn’t mean you have to recreate the same experience. No one forces you to project the past into the future, which is all just an act of imagination.

The Truth of You

Before we get into a practical approach to dealing with anxiety, let’s zoom out a bit.

Acknowledge that what you are is not this small, powerless human being who is a victim to the whims of the scary world.

Yes, there is a human component to you. That’s the relative aspect. But to become truly human our first job is to see that we are infinitely more than that.

This has nothing to do with spiritual beliefs or anything like that. We are talking about your immediate experience right now.

Do it right now. Look at your experience.

You’re not experiencing the world. You’re experiencing your experience of the world.

Have you noticed?

There is no world outside of you. Even if there was one, you’re forever shut out from it. No one can ever access it because no one can peek outside of their experience. So you might as well forget about some scary imagined outside and move on.

That’s not all.

You might think, “Poor me. I’m here having my lonely experience.”

Not so fast, compadre.

You don’t have an experience; you are the experience.

This, what we call experience we can also call consciousness or awareness or Tao or, perhaps more accurate than all these terms, thingamajig.

And you are that. You are the all. That is as close as we can get to expressing the truth of what we are.

If you allow this to move beyond mere cerebral understanding, and check this in your own experience to confirm it for yourself, you’ll feel the big bad world take a big step back already.

That doesn’t mean all your struggles will be over. It’s an important step nonetheless.

What to Do with Anxiety?

Okay but what do we do now, with the anxiety?

We’re not doing anything with it. Despite the problem we seem to have with it, anxiety is not something we need to fix. We’re merely looking at it more closely.

Get this. If you’re able to hold anxiety in unconditional acceptance not trying to make it go away or do anything with it so that in a true sense you are the anxiety as the immediate experience of it, then you don’t need anything else. You’ve got it.

If you feel like you’re not able to do this, read on.

Are you anxious about something right now? Look behind it. What is it hiding?

You might think you’re afraid of some event, but what you’re really afraid of is the feelings you associate with the event.

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Let me illustrate this:

You might’ve watched the movie Dune or, if you’re a bit more retro, read the book. If you haven’t but plan to then you’re out of luck. I’m going to spoil you now. (Don’t worry it’s not a major spoiler.)

In the first movie, Paul Atreides has to undergo a test where he puts his hand into a box that causes tremendous pain. If he withdraws his hand, the Reverend Mother Gaius Mohiam (= fancy name for manipulating nun) will kill him with the Gom Jabbar (= fancy name for poisoned needle).

The box doesn’t actually hurt you physically. It “only” causes agonizing sensations of pain.

Now imagine you had to put your hand inside this box. You know it wouldn’t damage your hand. But you’d still be anxious because you’re anticipating the pain.

—

Anxiety is a coping mechanism. It keeps you in a conceptual world where you can avoid facing unwanted feelings and emotions now. In a sense, anxiety is trying to protect the you you think you are.

But like all coping mechanisms, sooner rather than later it stops working and becomes the problem itself. The more anxious you feel the more you’ve made that conceptual world of your imagination your home.

This is what happens when we’re feeling anxious. We’re afraid of future unwanted emotions and feelings.

And this is the key to dissolving anxiety or at least reducing the power it seems to have in your life.

What is more uncomfortable, feeling the emotion you associate with the negative outcome directly OR, feeling the anxious resistance in anticipation of the possibility that the negative outcome might happen?

Read that again before moving on.

If you’re only staying on the level of resistance, the anxiety will most likely linger around.

Let’s say you’re anxious about your partner leaving you. What you’re afraid of is the sadness that comes with the breakup.

Feel that.

Feel the sadness and see that you don’t need to be afraid of it. When you do that you’ll see the anxiety evaporating.

This makes sense.

If your partner were to actually leave you, you’d no longer be anxious about it, right? You might feel sad but not anxious.

Then, you might feel anxious about being lonely, but then you can apply the same process. Go straight to the feeling that scares you.

By doing this, you’re dissolving your fear of feelings and emotions, which is what anxiety is — fear of feelings and emotions.

But What About Positivity?

Many people, especially the ones who have dabbled with manifestation and laws of attraction, believe to empower yourself you must focus only on the positive.

Everything you choose to put your attention on consciously is empowering.

“But Luka, at other times you have said that whatever I put my attention on will grow. Doesn’t that mean the negative emotion will grow?”

Good point. The answer is no.

Here choosing it or putting your attention on it simply means accepting it and releasing the resistance to it and therefore relieving it of its shadowy power in your life.

You don’t have to make yourself feel more; you don’t have to worship negative emotions; you don’t have to endlessly return to the same emotion. You just have to acknowledge what is there as it’s there.

Actually, as long as you refuse to acknowledge the underlying emotion, your attention will be drawn to it. Part of your attention will always wander to whatever you’re resistant to.

If you choose to give something your unconditional attention you reclaim the power it had. Now the power is with you not with the emotion you’re trying to avoid.

This is not something to work on. It’s more like an opening up to and allowing of experience. You’re not doing any of this to get rid of anything.

You acknowledge what is there, feel it, and then release it. That’s it.

No imagination-based emotion can withstand the power of presence forever.

Noticing how you’re experiencing rather than what you’re experiencing is more representative of the truth of your being. This is because we can only ever know how something is but not what it is. What is only ever conceptual.

Be with the how not the what. Then your attention is no longer occupied with avoiding all the subterranean emotions you’ve been trying to navigate around. And you’ll automatically have more of the positive stuff.

It’s Your Choice

You might have noticed that anxiety was just a doorway into the investigation of our experience. This was never about anxiety per se. We used anxiety as an excuse to dive into the actuality of our nondual experience.

I want to emphasize one more time that what we’ve talked about here is about releasing resistance toward your experience. And to release it you’re allowing your whole experience to manifest unmolested (i.e. you stop fighting it).

The more you allow your experience, the more things settle down. The body-mind organism starts relaxing. Thoughts and emotions no longer have a tight grip over you. The mental drama dies.

You’ll reach a point when you realize that all thoughts and emotions are nothing more than invitations. You have a choice whether to engage them or not. In other words, you can choose if you want the mind to grasp the thoughts and emotions or not.

The second layer of thinking — thinking about thinking — is no longer compulsory but optional.

And even if you engage with thoughts and emotions you’ll find that you can snap out of it. You’re no longer identified with thoughts and emotions. You no longer need them to tell you who or what you are.

You can enjoy it all now. You can enjoy your own craziness the way you enjoy a movie. When you’re not identified with it, you can even enjoy anxiety. There will probably be much less of it though.

If you haven’t experienced that yet, it might sound unrealistic. But what’s really unrealistic is trying to control everything so that you can avoid experiencing certain feelings and emotions.

Don’t avoid anything.

Rediscover that unconditional place in you that can’t be bullied by thoughts, emotions, feelings, and experiences. That place, which is ubiquitous, always accepts and allows what is, including negative emotions, anxiety, and everything else the human dislikes. And it doesn’t see anything wrong with any of it.

So, do you want to endlessly try to control your experience or would you rather be fine no matter what?

The choice is yours.

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Luka

Hello friend! My name is Luka and I am the creator of mindfulled. Here you'll find illustrated essays and stories about spiritual awakening and the art of living.

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