Anxiety and Alchemy
- Brainz Magazine
- Mar 9, 2021
- 5 min read
Updated: Mar 11, 2021
Written by: Byron Athene, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
Anxiety is one of the most common problems in life. Despite its prevalence, it’s an issue that’s often easy to resolve. This article will show how easy. It will also illustrate how you can incorporate it into a framework that supports a healthier and happier life. Despite the usually negative association, anxiety can be an excellent tool and a valuable source of foresight.
Psychoeducation
This is one of the methods used to resolve anxiety – or at least reduce it. It means learning more about the condition; the more you know about it, the less it will affect you. Having more information can interrupt or disrupt the automatic processes that maintain anxiety.
Psychoeducation alone can resolve anxiety. Psychoeducation and behavioral experiments will resolve it quickly.
So what is anxiety?
Anxiety is the perception of threat. The presence of threat indicates that we are at risk of harm. When someone feels anxiety, they consciously or subconsciously believe a situation to be life-threatening. One of the most important jobs our brains have is to protect and perpetuate existence. This might explain why anxiety is so common. Events trigger a perception of threat in two different ways. There’s amygdala-based anxiety and cortex-based anxiety.
Association activates amygdala-based anxiety. The amygdala is the part of the brain responsible for the fight, flight, or freeze response. When you survive threatening situations, you will make associations. Then, something you have associated with the original event can trigger fear, such as a smell, color, or sound.
Thoughts activate cortex-based anxiety. You could be feeling relaxed but then have a series of thoughts. These thoughts can make you believe that you should be feeling scared. It is common for people to report that once negative thoughts start, momentum builds, and it becomes difficult to stop. This means the amygdala becomes activated because people have reasoned themselves into a state of alert.
Unhealthy Negative Emotions
According to Albert Ellis, the originator of CBT, anxiety is an unhealthy negative emotion. A goal in his therapy was to move a client from the unhealthy negative emotion of anxiety to the healthy negative emotion of worry or concern. Ellis believed the unhealthy emotions are static or stuck states. If you’re experiencing a stuck state, you will be less likely to resolve the issue. If you’re feeling a more resourceful state of concern or worry, you’re more likely to resolve the thing that you’re worrying about. If you’re anxious, you avoid the thing you’re feeling anxious about, which helps maintain the anxiety. If you’re concerned, you can plan, which can increase the chances of securing better outcomes.
The Pillars of Anxiety
Anxiety has three pillars, and all three pillars must be in place – at the same time – to maintain the anxiety response. The first pillar is the overestimation of the threat. The second is underestimating your ability to cope with the threat. The last is underestimating the level of support you think you would get in the face of that threat. If any of the three pillars were missing, the framework would collapse, and you wouldn’t feel anxiety. At worse, you could feel worry or concern. If you didn’t overestimate the threat but did underestimate your ability to cope and the level of support, you wouldn’t feel anxious, likewise for the sole absence of the other two pillars.
A Treatment Plan
The treatment of anxiety has a basic structure. It’s similar to the treatment of trauma. It has three steps—exposure, self-regulation, and cognitive restructuring. Exposure involves putting yourself into situations that will usually trigger anxiety. Self-regulation centers around being comfortable with the situation's emotions. You can use cognitive restructuring when you feel unable to self-regulate. This involves thinking or talking to yourself in a way that helps you to bear feelings that you may consider unbearable.
Exposure
You can use behavioral experiments to help this process. An example of a behavioral experiment is picking a worrying event and resolving the anxiety in that event. Start small. In a mildly anxiety-provoking situation, get used to the idea that feeling scared doesn’t mean you’re in danger. Once you believe you’re not in danger, your body will stop acting like it is. You can then move on to situations that you consider more anxiety-provoking. You could even start by just imagining being in situations because the brain will respond in the same way as if you were. The more varied and vivid the visualization, the more impact this will have.
Self-regulation
There are many exercises you can use to develop self-regulation. One of the quickest is to bring about a state of relaxation consciously. It’s impossible to be anxious and relaxed at the same time. Inducing relaxation is a reliable and congruent way of signaling to yourself that you are not in danger. Feeling relaxed in situations that are usually anxiety-provoking will rewire the brain. A quick and discreet way to induce relaxation is 5/5/5 breathing. This is where you breathe in for five seconds, hold it for five seconds and then breathe out for five seconds. Doing this five times usually yields immediately effective results.
Cognitive Restructuring
If you feel unable to self-regulate, you can introduce to yourself self-soothing statements. There are three general examples that you can apply to almost any situation. The first is reminding yourself of the three pillars. Nominate at least one pillar and remove it. The next is telling yourself that anxiety is an over-activation of your fight, flight, or freeze response. The third and final example is telling yourself that anxiety is the conviction that you’re in a life-threatening situation. When you’re feeling anxious, there’s no evidence to suggest that you’re at risk of physical harm at all.
Shifting Anxiety
If you’re feeling anxious, use those three steps to move you from anxiety to concern or worry. A sensible way to treat worry and concern is to focus on what you’re worrying or concerned about. You can then set about preparing for the event. This could include revising, researching, and rehearsing, depending on the event you’re worrying about. Preparation to this extent can lead to a level of relaxation. If you’re relaxed, you’re more likely to get better emotional, psychological, and behavioral results. Thus, the presence of anxiety can increase the chances of performing better than before you started feeling anxious. The relaxation aspect has added general health benefits. There have been studies that link relaxation to longer lifespans.
Alchemists
How does alchemy fit into this? It involved trying to turn base metals like lead into more precious metals like gold. Alchemists also looked for a universal cure for diseases. They also tried to find a way to lengthen lives. Alchemists were not successful: they have not been able to turn lead into gold; a universal cure has not been engineered; they did not discover a way to prolong life. However, we can all be successful alchemists: when we feel anxious, we can transform the now into something much better; we’re able to cure this particular disease, and we can lead longer, healthier lives in the process.
In summary, taking onboard the analogy of alchemy allows us to accept and appreciate anxiety and align it as an ever-present, worry-alleviating, and life-affirming ally.
Byron Athene, Executive Contributor, Brainz Magazine
After fully immersing himself into the fields of philosophy and psychology for 30 years, Byron Athene is truly an innovative force. His 'Generative Mindset' and 'Emotions Mastery' packages vastly extend the boundaries of conventional thinking. He encourages clients to change their current perspective. This often results in them immediately tapping into the infinite source of creativity and power of the mind and this will have significant emotional, psychological and behavioral benefits.
