Anxiety

Expressing and Suppressing Anxiety

Keli Rugenstein, PhD, Samaritan Counseling Center

            In the last article, anxiety was defined. This month let’s take a look at expressing and suppressing anxiety. Mentioned last month were the many ways that anxiety can be observed in people. People also will tell you they are nervous about something they are anticipating. Sometimes it comes as no surprise when someone tells us they are nervous about an upcoming event because we have been watching them pace, wring their hands, bite their nails, etc. Other times we are surprised because we see no outward sign that they are one bit anxious. Which is better? How do we get rid of anxiety?

            We will never be rid of anxiety – it serves a purpose. Anxiety is a primal response to anticipation that helps us become and/or stay alert to our circumstances. Think about teaching your 16 year old to drive – you want them to be experiencing a heightened level of anxiety! It is present in many levels depending on the situation – or at least it should be. Sometimes a lack of an appropriate amount of anxiety leads one to take risks or disregard warning signs that would help us make better decisions. Too much anxiety for a given situation can cause us to be overprotective, guarded, defensive, or too narrowly focused. Each of these responses to anxiety can interfere with our relationships with others.

            Spend the next month assessing yourself and your response to anxiety. Is it internal or external? Do you talk too much when you are nervous? Do you laugh louder or at inappropriate times? Do your hands sweat? Does your stomach tighten? Are your shoulders tense? Do you breathe shallower? Do you cry? Does your jaw tighten? Do you grind your teeth? Do you go to the refrigerator? Ask someone you trust what they notice about you when you are nervous. Keep that information handy and think about it while reading the next  article.

This Thing Called Anxiety

            We hear it all the time. People are talking about anxiety everywhere – in the doctor’s office, with their best friend, with their pastor. So what is anxiety? It’s an emotion – just like grief, joy, disappointment, and anger. And all emotions become expressed in behaviors given the right circumstance. The emotion of humor is expressed as laughter. The emotion of joy is expressed with exuberance. Anxiety is expressed in many ways. Look around and you will see these behaviors in others – nail biting, hair twiddling, leg vibrating, gum chewing, throat clearing, pacing – well you get the idea. Anxiety is expressed many ways and is as individual as your finger print and as common as the cold.

            Let’s first define a couple of these emotions so you get the idea. Grief is the energy of sadness. Laughter is the energy of humor. Anxiety is the energy of anticipation. Remember that feeling on Christmas Eve when Santa was supposed to be coming? Remember that feeling just before you walked down the aisle for your wedding?  Remember that feeling the last time you went to the dentist? All of those feelings are the result of the energy of anticipation – anxiety. We’ve all experienced it but we don’t all behave the same way in response to those experiences.

            Why is it that we don’t all respond to anxiety the same way? Because we’ve all been trained to respond to anxiety in a different classroom. One of the first things we are trained to do is suppress the expression of anxiety. The behaviors that we exhibit in our early years are pretty primal so our caregivers stopped us when they saw us crying (especially when the reason we were crying didn’t make sense to them), told us to ‘be brave’ when we were shy, took away our pencils when we chewed them, and so on. So we had to develop other ways to express our anxiety, or worse yet, suppress it. Suppressing anxiety can have devastating physical effects.

Expressing and Suppressing Anxiety

           It was mentioned earlier than people express anxiety in many ways. People also will tell you they are nervous about something they are anticipating. Sometimes it comes as no surprise when someone tells us they are nervous about an upcoming event because we have been watching them pace, wring their hands, bite their nails, etc. Other times we are surprised because we see no outward sign that they are one bit anxious. Which is better? How do we get rid of anxiety?

            We will never be rid of anxiety – it serves a purpose. Anxiety is a primal response to anticipation that helps us become and/or stay alert to our circumstances. Think about teaching your 16 year old to drive – you want them to be experiencing a heightened level of anxiety! It is present in many levels depending on the situation – or at least it should be. Sometimes a lack of an appropriate amount of anxiety leads one to take risks or disregard warning signs that would help us make better decisions. Too much anxiety for a given situation can cause us to be overprotective, guarded, defensive, or too narrowly focused. Each of these responses to anxiety can interfere with our relationships with others.

            Spend the next month assessing yourself and your response to anxiety. Is it internal or external? Do you talk too much when you are nervous? Do you laugh louder or at inappropriate times? Do your hands sweat? Does your stomach tighten? Are your shoulders tense? Do you breathe shallower? Do you cry? Does your jaw tighten? Do you grind your teeth? Do you go to the refrigerator? Ask someone you trust what they notice about you when you are nervous. Keep that information handy and think about it while reading the next  article. 

Suppressing Anxiety and Your Physical Response to It

 So what did you learn by observing yourself when you were anxious? Were you able to learn anything you hadn’t noticed before? Was it hard to figure out how you express anxiety? All of us express it somehow – even if we just get quiet. Watch an old western where they play poker. The best poker players can read the other players by  their ‘tells’ – a word that describes their anxiety response to excitement or anticipation. Sometimes they hold their eyes differently, shift positions in their seats, or some other very subtle gesture gives them away to the eagle eye.

Anxiety is an emotion and all emotion has a physical expression. If anxiety is chronically suppressed and never given an outlet it affects many things in your body – usually where you are weakest. The energy of anxiety, if not properly addressed, bounces around in your nervous system like a pin ball in an arcade game. When it is not given an outlet, its constant motion becomes an irritant to your body. Here are some examples.

If, for instance, one way we deal with anxiety is to breathe more shallow,  but your body is getting less oxygen. Less oxygen is a signal to your brain that you are in danger. Your body responds to the danger in many ways. You may become hypervigilant – never able to enjoy the moment because you are always anticipating some un-named event that ‘might’ happen. Sometimes it is difficult to sit still. In this sort of a situation, there are healthy alternatives and not-so-healthy alternatives. You could eat to occupy yourself, or clean the house, or drink, or jog, or walk the dog – you get the idea. Some of the other ways that anxiety gets to us physically are very silent – they affect our blood pressure or our heart – these can also be deadly. When we already have a physical condition, the stress can make it worse. Keep looking for ways that anxiety affects you and how you handle it. It is a job we should never give up on because of the wonderful physical and emotional benefits we get from learning how we express anxiety and then learning how to manage it.

 Physical Consequences to Suppressing Stress

Every emotion we feel is somehow expressed physically. When we feel humor, we laugh. When we grieve we cry, hang our head, and sometimes withdraw or even get angry. When we are confused we knit our brows together. We smile when we are pleased. Most physical expressions of emotions are universal and mean the same around the world which indicates the natural inclination of the body to respond to emotion as a means of letting others know what we are feeling. When we try to suppress the physical expression of an emotion, our body is being forced to act in an unnatural manner. Have you ever tried not to laugh when you found something really funny? You can actually feel it in your body, and sometimes we make no noise, but our body heaves with the energy of the laughter we are suppressing.

The energy that is created by heightened anxiety, when not expressed, remains in our body. It becomes an energy that runs through our body in an almost indiscernible fashion, in a feedback loop because it is trapped. It can cause or make worse an already existing condition. When that happens internally, we cannot see how our body is reacting to the hyper-activated nervous system. We may feel it, as in an ulcer, but we cannot see it, as in pacing, sweating, or shallow breathing. Stress can even weaken our immune defenses.

Expressions of anxiety are frowned upon in many cultures, ours included. Initially, it wasn’t a good thing to let someone who was causing you anxiety know that were frightened or upset, and in some cases, it may still be that way today. Some cultures see it as a sign of weakness. We have become so good at hiding our anxiety that we don’t even notice that we are doing it any more. All healthy humans suppress anxiety. However, if not attended to in some manner, we pay a price for doing so.