On Dealing with Anxiety and Mindfulness

This year has really seen me experiencing mad bouts of anxiety that
really shook me up. I almost always never knew what to do in the moment and
it really sucked!

I, at one time mentioned my anxiety to a friend of mine. At first, she thought
I was just throwing the word around, but after explaining the feeling, she
acknowledged her mistaken assumption. From this experience, I feel the need to
elaborate what I mean when I say; “I experienced mad bouts of anxiety”.

By using the word anxiety I mean to represent the feelings I experience
whenever something I have a hard time dealing with triggers me. These
feelings include but aren’t limited to:

My throat constricting.
A feeling of heaviness in my chest.
My body feeling all tense and wound up.
Struggling to breathe.
Headaches and feeling light headed.

These feelings are almost always coupled with:

Energy depletion and being completely unable to do anything.
Emotional exhaustion.
Compulsively checking for results.

Allow me to paint you a picture.

It’s February 2020 and my consultancy contract has come to an unexpected end.
I get referred to a company that was supposedly hiring at the time,
The first interview goes beautifully and I feel really confident about it.
I go home with a code assessment, it’s due in a week.
I get to work.
I put in just over 40 hours that week writing code. Not to account
for research and debugging and going through documentation.

Confident I had done a great job, building a front end interface, and an API complete with documentation,
I submit my work. I am full of hope.
I’ve aced this.
A week goes by, nothing. No response no feedback, nothing at all.
And previously, I got replies in hours as I was asking for support.
I send in a follow up email, having waited a week trying to be polite and patient.
Still nothing.

The self doubt starts creeping in, accompanied with heavy anxiety. This was
not supposed to play out like this!!.
Two weeks.
Three weeks.
I finally give up
I wasn’t good enough to get a reply.
I wasn’t worth his time.
I am a complete failure.

I tell myself all these mean things.
And now every job posting I look at, triggers me.
I dread the same thing happening.
I dread not being good enough a second, third, fourth time.
For the next few months, I can’t apply for anything new.
Every time I think about a job my chest gets heavy.
I hate it here.

This went on unsolved for months.
Up until July, when I met Yellow, virtually. Obviously.
Hello COVID 19.
And my dearest anxiety found a new avenue to terrorize me once more.

We hit it off soo beautifully and soon I started dreading the fact that this
budding relationship could disappear in a flash.
I obsessively checked my phone, spending north of 10 hours a day
waiting to see her name light up my screen.
It was getting really bad and prolonged periods of not getting a text from her
would trigger anxiety attacks.
I finally had enough. I needed to do something.

Me being me, I love TED talks and as I experienced all this I remembered
one very influential talk about habits by Dr. Jud Brewer.
A simple way to break a bad habit.

He mentions the concept of positive and negative reinforcement.
A simple process really,
It goes like,
Trigger > Behavior > Reward.

For me, that went like.
Think about Yellow > Check phone > Reward.
Where reward for me was one of two things.
If she had texted I was happy.
If she had not texted I was highly likely to experience an anxiety attack,
depending on how long it had been since she last texted.

Dr. Jud Brewer goes on to mention the concept of Mindfulness.
Where he encourages curiosity when experiencing things.
Be curious about how things you experience make you feel.

And so I became curious about my anxiety.
I watched myself, almost as if I detached and in 3rd person.
What I noticed was interesting…
My anxiety made me experience the worst possibility of my current situation.
A possibility I had no control over.
It went further to cripple me.
And in doing so sabotage what I actually had control over in the present time.

I was no longer interested in being a slave to my anxiety.
And so, I became hyper aware of situations that would trigger me.
And when I found myself in one.
I paused, took deep breaths and reminded myself that I was doing my best.
And that if I let my anxiety take control of me I would be sabotaging my current efforts.

And I for the next few days I stopped and took long breaths A LOT.
It was A STRUGGLE. It still is, but I have since managed to manage it.

I went on to share this experience with Yellow.
Because I was sure, she probably had already experienced something similar and if
not was going to soon.
It actually turned out that she was just starting to experience it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

So I think, I helped her out.
In sharing it became a lighter load for me.
And now, in sharing this with you, I hope that you’ve gained a new tool.
As you tackle your anxieties and any other experiences that such a tool
would be useful in.

To summarize,
Be mindfully aware > Curiously explore your struggles
Identify how they make you feel > Identify actions to change the experience
Try and put these actions to use > Repeat.

These things will always require you to work on them.
It’s like the gym. If you don’t work out, It doesn’t work out ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I still get anxious. The only difference is that now I have a tool to turn to whenever I do.
And so do you.

God Speed mate. Enjoy your week ;- )