Managing Anxiety By Giving Yourself What You Need

When's the last time you asked yourself, "What do I need right now?" 

I'd bet it's been a while. But ever since I interviewed Yale's Emma Seppälä, I've been trying a new experiment with my anxiety. When anxious thoughts or feelings rush in, I pause and ask myself: What do you need?

It's simple, she says. Let's say you're having an anxious moment. What do you need right now? Maybe you need a nap. Maybe you need to eat something. Maybe you need to just take a walk around the block. What's something concrete you can do? 

Listen to my conversation with Emma:

When we get too hungry, for instance, we activate the sympathetic nervous system. "You don't even realize you're anxious, but it's actually because the last time you ate was five hours ago." Parents make sure their kids are fed and rested to avoid meltdowns, but no one does that for us grownups. "So can we do that for ourselves?" Seppälä wonders. "Oh, when was the last time that I stepped outside? I've been at my computer for eight hours straight. Or when was the last time I ate something? What do I need?"

Sometimes, I find, my anxiety is telling me I need to ask for help. Sometimes I get anxious about money, about clients, about my kids, even about the state of disrepair in my house. I need to not feel alone in the struggle. I need good advice, a friend, community.

Anxiety is always telling us something. Emotions are clues but usually we ignore them. Maybe you need action in your body. Maybe you need to let those emotions run through you and escape!

Seppälä says, "Emotions are energy in motion." This sentence has changed my life! Last week I stopped to have a tantrum. I needed to let some anger out. I knew if it stayed in me I'd get a migraine and my day would be shot. And so I stopped everything and I screamed and yelled and cried. 

Most of us don't grow up learning the skills necessary to healthily manage uncomfortable emotions (check out my recent episode on Mental Health Literacy and my conversation with Yale's Marc Brackett on identifying emotions). At lectures, Seppälä notes, "When I ask [audiences], what do you do with your big, bad, negative emotions? What's the main thing you've learned? It's to suppress them.”

When you're suppressing anger, you get angrier inside, and it hurts your mental health. It hurts your relationships and your physical health too. Seppälä explains this is when we're experiencing "bound" emotions. You're bound to the emotion; it's still there. Let's think about kids again- they act out, things pass, they regulate. "When you think about a child, a child is angry for one or two minutes max, it's feeling anger intensely, and then the anger is gone and they're best friends with the person they were just so angry with." Unlike adults, children fully experience the emotion and then the energy moves through them and out. As adults, we don't want to feel bad ever. So we push it down and then we try to compensate. And at the end of the day, the emotion is stuck within.

A sovereign relationship with our emotions, explains Seppälä, is allowing ourselves to feel the emotion and let the energy move through us and experience it fully. We don’t want to feel it, but at the end of the day, that is how we're going to be free. 

Whenever you have an anxious response, let that be a cue to ask, what do I need right now? You might have an automatic anxious thought, a vociferous inner critic, or a nervous system that wants to rev up. Instead, pause and ask yourself: what do I need right now? Am I hungry? Do I need to let it all out?

Seppälä notes that achievers might need to practice listening to what we need, and letting go. "And maybe it just means, actually, I don't need to be doing this work right now. It's not a life or death situation, and what I really need is to go outside and go for a walk in the woods because I deserve to sleep tonight. And if I stay up with more anxiety, I'm probably going to not sleep either."

Honoring your needs is based in science, so don’t feel selfish next time to stop to take care of yourself!

Morra

P.S.: I recommend Emma's new book, Sovereign: Reclaim Your Freedom, Energy, and Power in a Time of Distraction, Uncertainty, and Chaos- check it out!