Anxiety is not just a condition, it is part of the human experience. We ALL experience anxiety at some time or another. Anxiety is really just another way of saying that our brain is in a state of high stress. Perhaps one of the most exhausting things about experiencing anxiety is that our brain can get stuck in what is called “hypervigilance,” or being “hyper” about being “vigilant.” Like a soldier that never rests, always scanning the horizon for any threats, being in a highly anxious state can cause your mind to be ever-scanning for possible threats – anything that could harm you or those you love. When a computer does a virus scan, it often slows the computer down, causing it to take longer for the computer to do other forms of processing. This is what also happens in your mind – you might not be actively thinking of the threats, but in the back of your mind, the scan is in progress, and this makes it harder to focus, concentrate, and be efficient with the tasks at hand. It’s also absolutely exhausting. In addition, while it is doing this scanning, our minds have a tendency to over-focus on what is out of our control, and under-focus on what we do control. This tends to escalate anxiety, as it leads to a sense of powerlessness.
There is a difference between what we have control over versus what we only influence. In essence, we have much more control over our thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviors than we do over anyone else’s. While we have influence over the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviors of others, no matter what we do, we can’t ultimately control these things about anyone. Not our kids, friends, parents, partners, coworkers, boss, or anyone else. Yet when we are stressed, we tend to over-focus on trying to figure out how to change the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviors of whoever is stressing us out. This is because we are often pretty convinced that we personally can’t get to a better place unless the thoughts, feelings, emotions, and behaviors of others change somehow. So we stew, brew, plan, ruminate, convince, beg, bargain, punish, and do just about anything else we can think of to try to get others to change. But this usually ends up resulting in a dynamic tug of war – the more we pull, the more they pull back, and vice versa.
As you can imagine, this only spikes the anxiety, because not only do we still not have any real solutions to change the situation, we also have the people involved pulling back at us, resulting in more conflict. It’s exhausting, it’s futile, and at times, we all do it. But it’s important to note that we have options, we have choices, and one of the most fundamental choices we make is what to highlight in our minds when we are dealing with high stress or anxiety. No one else can make that choice for us, we have to drive that part. If instead of highlighting what we don’t have control over, we instead highlight what we do, which is our thoughts, feelings, emotions, beliefs, and behaviors, we can paint a very different picture of the stressful scenario we are dealing with. But doing this is not intuitive or natural when we face high-stress scenarios. It can also be difficult to do something that is stressing us out because our stress response is so activated, which makes it hard to be flexible with our thinking. So instead of thinking specifically of the situation that stresses us, if instead, we simply highlight positive experiences we have and recognize the role we played in helping those positive experiences to occur, our mind can then utilize this information and help translate it to other more stressful situations it tends to get stuck in. BrainSculpt MindSpa program is specifically focused on helping you highlight and recognize the role you have played in helping positive experiences to occur. Practicing the recognition that we play in creating experiences allows us to more actively utilize the power of choice when dealing with high-stress scenarios.
