What is the Point of Anxiety?

Image by Francesco

If you struggle with high levels of anxiety you may, understandably, wish you could never feel anxious again. If there was a big switch marked ‘Anxiety’, you would probably flick it to the OFF position and hope it stayed that way for the rest of your life. And no wonder – anxiety is a horrible feeling, especially when you experience it intensely and on a regular basis. No-one likes feeling anxious.

But when I am helping my clients with chronic anxiety, one of the first things I do is explain why humans experience anxiety, the function of this uncomfortable emotion both in terms of evolution and neurology – how it shows up in your nervous system, including your brain. The first thing to understand about anxiety is that it’s supposed to feel uncomfortable. That’s so you can’t just ignore it and carry on with your day.

To understand this properly, let’s jump into a time machine and journey back 10,000 years, to meet one of your ancestors living on the African savannah. She would be living with a small tribe of hunter-gatherers, in a village surrounded by a fence constructed from the spikiest branches they could find. Why? Because outside that fence would be very large, very hungry animals who wanted to eat them.

Anxiety is an alarm signal

Let’s say your ancestor left the village with two other women to forage for berries, roots, plants and whatever they could find to feed their families that day. As she walked across the savannah, she noticed the grass to her left start rustling. And she froze, as the threat system in her brain first detected the threat and then – in split seconds – decide how to respond. Thinking it might be one of the lions that often hunted near this spot, her brain cycled through the options of fight, flee or freeze and decided fleeing was her best chance of survival.

So her amygdala – a small structure in the brain whose primary job is mobilising the rest of the brain and body to deal with threats – gave her a massive jolt of anxiety to signal, Run! At the same time, the amygdala engaged with other parts of her brain to give your ancestor a shot of adrenaline and cortisol, quicken her breathing and heart rate to pump oxygenated blood to the major muscles in her arms and legs. And she ran, fast, until the potentially-a-lion threat was far behind her.

And this is what anxiety is for – to tell you that:

1. There is a threat.

2. And you should do something about it, urgently.

For your ancestor, this whole mind-body process might just have saved her life. And even in our 21st-century world, which is far safer than the one she lived in, anxiety will probably have saved your life, or the life of a loved one. This is why we should never try to get rid of anxiety completely, even if we could, because it can quite literally be a life-saver.

Calming your nervous system is key

I hope that gives you some idea of why you feel so anxious – and why that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The problem is, for most of us, our anxiety is not triggered by lions in the grass, but by a nasty email from your boss, warning letter from the bank or critical comment from a family member. These are all threatening, hence the spike of anxiety they trigger, but not in the life-or-death way those rather primitive parts of your brain are designed to save you from.

So rather than trying to shut down your anxiety, or get rid of it, the key is first learning to accept this normal, healthy and in fact vital emotion. Then finding tools and techniques to bring your dysregulated nervous system back into balance, calming, soothing and reassuring parts of your brain like the amygdala that are yelling ‘lion!’ when there is none.

If you are really struggling with your anxiety, I would encourage you to find a skilled therapist to help heal whatever wounds from your past are making you feel so anxious right now. And this therapy, as well as any other healing tools you employ, should focus on helping calm and soothe your overheated nervous system. You can do that right now, using this Compassionate Breathing technique I recently blogged about.

I would also recommend anything that feels calming or soothing for you, like self-help books and podcasts from therapists/other healers you trust, yoga, tai chi, hugs from your beloved pet/partner/kids/close friends or family members, relaxing massage or soothing music/TV shows/movies. Really anything that helps you feel calmer, safer and more at peace will be good for your anxious brain. Over time, this will reduce the flow of stress hormones like cortisol into your bloodstream, while increasing pleasurable, calming hormones like oxytocin and endorphins.

If you would like to know more about anxiety and how to manage it you may also find my latest Insight Timer course, Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems, helpful – if so, just click the button below to find out more.

And my Insight Timer collection has a wide range of meditations, breathwork techniques, guided imagery, sleep stories and much more to help with problems like stress, anxiety and depression.

I hope that helps – sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Announcing My New Course: Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems

Image by Giulia Bertelli

I am pleased to announce the launch of my second Premium Audio Course for Insight Timer – Easing Worry & Anxiety with Internal Family Systems. If you sign up to this six-day course today you will learn why you feel so anxious, starting with the evolutionary and neurological roots of anxiety, explaining why it’s a crucial emotion for us all to feel, because it alerts us to threats and helps us react to them, quickly if need be.

Understanding why you feel so anxious is a key step in learning to accept it, because anxiety is something we all feel and is an important alarm signal when things need our attention. And then helping you ease it over time – this course will help you start to feel calmer, safer, and more at peace, step by step.

Over the six days you will also learn about internal family systems therapy, which is one of the fastest growing and most popular models of therapy in the world right now. As an Internal Family Systems Therapist, I use this warm, compassionate, and highly effective treatment approach with my clients and in my teaching, because it offers a revolutionary way of understanding problems like chronic anxiety.

Meeting your young, anxious part

You will learn that this anxiety comes from an anxious young part of you, holding painful thoughts, feelings, and memories of difficult experiences in your childhood. To ease your anxiety, you need to learn how to connect with, understand and soothe this anxious little boy or girl inside.

I will also teach you that worry comes from another part of you, called the Worrier. Again, you will learn how to accept and even value this protective part, because it’s just trying to help, even if the way it does so can be stressful and exhausting at times.

I hope you join me on this transformative six-day journey, which includes theories and techniques drawn from my many years of helping clients better manage their anxiety. As well as trauma-informed teaching about the mind-body source of problematic anxiety, I will lead you through powerful calming techniques including breathwork and guided-imagery exercises, drawn from IFS and other trauma-informed therapy models.

The course is free if you become a Member Plus Supporter. This costs just $60 for 12 months of high-quality content like this on the Insight Timer app from me and thousands of other leading teachers. ⁠

Try it now by visiting my Insight Timer collection or clicking on the button below. ⁠

I hope you find it insightful and healing. ⁠

Love ❤️⁠

Dan

Feeling Stressed? My Compassionate Breathing Practice Will Help

Here is a video of my Compassionate Breathing practice. You can use this any time you're feeling stressed, anxious, upset, agitated or if you're dealing with any kind of difficult emotion.

I hope you find it helpful – you will find this practice, as well as many other breathing techniques, mindfulness, self-compassion and IFS meditations, as well as guided-imagery techniques, in my Insight Timer collection: insighttimer.com/danrobertstherapy

Love ❤️

Dan

If You Struggle With Climate Anxiety, this Book Will Give You Hope

Image by Margot Richard

How do you feel about climate change? I’m guessing that, like most of us who take this problem seriously, you might find it worrying but try not to think about it too much. You do what you can – eat less meat, try not to fly, sign endless petitions – but try not to let it dominate your day-to-day life.

On a good day, this is how I deal with it too – doing what I can but trying not to get too freaked out. But I have to be honest, on bad days it really scares me. We are already seeing major impacts like melting glaciers, climate change-intensified hurricanes, forest fires, droughts and flooding. And unless humanity wakes up soon, we are in big trouble.

I think one of the less-reported aspects of climate change is its impact on our mental health, especially among the young. In a YouGov survey last year, one in three young people in Britain reported feeling scared (33%), sad (34%) or pessimistic (34%) about climate change, with 28% feeling ‘overwhelmed’. This breaks my heart for those young people, but it’s not surprising, because they will be most affected by climate change throughout the course of their lifetime. If you are a parent or grandparent, you may also be deeply worried about the kind of planet we will bequeath the next generation and the one after that – this is one reason why so many eco-activists are grandparents. They get it and feel compelled to act.

Reasons to be hopeful

So far, so gloomy. Which is why I am happy to tell you about the book I am currently reading, Not the End of the World: Why We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, by Hannah Ritchie. She is a data scientist at Oxford University and tells the story of feeling so freaked out as a student studying Earth Sciences, that she almost changed career. The onslaught of anxiety-provoking lectures on her course – and especially the stories about climate disasters she obsessively read in the media – were just overwhelming.

But this is a profoundly hopeful and optimistic book, because Ritchie argues that when you look at the actual data and key trends in energy use, pollution reduction, and so on, the real story is very different from the one we see in the media.

Let me be clear: Ritchie is no climate denier. She is a scientist who understands and accepts the prevailing scientific view – that climate change is real, it’s happening now, is man-made and unless we act fast to limit rising temperatures, humanity and all life on Earth is in big trouble. It’s just that she makes a compelling case that we have already made huge strides, at unprecedented speed, for example in decarbonising our energy production. In many industrialised countries we have virtually phased out the most polluting/carbon-emitting coal-fired power stations and rapidly developed green energies like solar, wind, hydroelectric and (somewhat controversially) nuclear.

Clean energy is now cheaper than its fossil-fuel alternatives and this will accelerate the more we adopt it at scale. This change is inevitable – as is the switch to electric cars/buses/trucks. As the cost of these green energies and modes of transport plummets, there is literally no reason not to make the switch, despite the increasingly devious and desperate tactics of the fossil-fuel industry. Sorry folks, this change is inevitable, whether you want it to be or not.

We have solved global problems before

Another argument I found really powerful and persuasive is that the global community has overcome two major environmental challenges before: acid rain in the 1980s and the ozone hole in the 1990s. In both cases, these were serious problems that required the global community to work together, despite resistance from the polluting industries that were causing the problems. And what led to the changes? Intense pressure from the public.

This led politicians to act, global treaties to be signed, industry to grudgingly change its polluting behaviour and, in both cases, drastic reductions in the harm to our environment. Now, climate change is a much bigger and more complex problem, but Ritchie argues – and I strongly believe – that if we all put enough pressure on our politicians, as well as using our consumer power to boycott the most climate-wrecking corporations/energy sources, we can solve this problem.

So if you or someone you love is struggling with climate anxiety, I strongly recommend you buy this book. It’s also packed with suggestions about how we, as individuals and communities, can make changes in the way we eat, shop and travel that can make a big difference. I am feeling hopeful about this problem for the first time in years, so I hope it will help you feel the same way too.

Sending you love and warm thoughts ❤️

Dan

Ease Your Stress with Colour Breathing

Image by J Lee

How are you feeling, right now? Sadly, for many of us the answer would be anxious, agitated, irritable, frazzled – and, most of all, stressed. That’s because we live in a very stressful time, with challenges to our mental and physical health that our ancestors could not have imagined in their wildest dreams.

One of my recent posts was all about exercise – and why it’s such a crucial element of looking after both mind and body. But, as we all know, many of us don’t get enough exercise or simply move our bodies enough, throughout the day. We also consume too much caffeine and alcohol, as well as eating excessive amounts of sugary, processed and otherwise unhealthy food. This idea – that, for those of us in industrialised countries like the UK, the most damaging thing to our health is excess – is a very new one, because for most of human history we didn’t have enough, of anything.

Your ancestors, and mine, spent large portions of their day walking for mile after mile, hunting prey or searching for seasonal fruits, seeds and edible roots. They often had to endure periods of hardship and even famine. Life was dominated by not having enough food, rather than too much of it.

So it’s a weird time to be human. Too much stuff. Too much sitting. Too much junk food, constantly within reach, that tastes good but damages your body.

Busyness as a badge of honour

The other weird thing about being a 21st-century human is just how hectic and stressful day-to-day life is. We are all (myself included) so damn busy these days, aren’t we? Everyone I know spends most of their waking hours rushing around, meeting one deadline after another, working long days – in fact, working all the time, because work follows us home now, in a way it never used to. And, weirdly, this busyness has become a badge of honour – it’s something to be proud of, a goal in itself to fill our days with being ‘productive’, allowing no time to rest and be still.

I’m currently reading a brilliant book about how our attention has been hijacked by the goals, values and imperatives of capitalism in general and Big Tech in particular. And how to resist the constant pressure to be busy, distracted, hopping from one screen to the next from the moment we wake until we fall into a restless, fitful sleep. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, by writer and artist Jenny Odell, champions time spent doing very little. Taking a break from the endless scrolling. Allowing yourself to be offline. Time to think, muse, daydream. It’s so important for the health of your brain, but so hard to do these days.

So, if your answer to the above question was ‘a bit stressed’, here’s a practice I created just for you. As regular readers will know, I am a big fan of mindfulness, as well as breathwork and other body-based practices to help manage tricky emotions and experiences. I love this practice because it combines those three things will adding an imaginary, visual element – which will provide a ‘healthy distraction’ if your mind is currently scattered and racing from one stressful thought to the next.

The practice

• Start by finding a comfortable sitting posture, on a straight-backed chair. Let your feet be flat and grounded on the floor. Gently roll your shoulders back and feel your chest open up, your lungs feeling expansive and open. This will help you breathe freely and deeply

• Close your eyes, if that feels comfortable for you, or soften and lower your gaze

• Scan your body and notice what you’re feeling, emotionally. You might be upset, angry, hurt, shocked, scared, threatened, agitated or feeling some other negative emotion

• Just let yourself feel whatever you’re feeling, for a few seconds

• Now focus on your body and mindfully scan your face, throat, arms, hands, chest, back and belly

• What do you notice? Perhaps tense, tight muscles. Maybe a sense of heat or rising energy in your chest. You might feel a tight knot, churning sensation or butterflies in your stomach

• There is no right or wrong way to feel, so just lean into whatever somatic sensations you are experiencing right now

• Check in with your posture, again rolling your shoulders back and letting them drop. Make sure you are sitting in an upright but relaxed posture

• Start slowing and deepening your breath, in through your nose and out through your mouth. Let your breaths be slow, deep and even, counting to four on the in-breath and four on the out-breath

• Keep breathing – slow, deep, smooth and steady, for a minute

• If you find yourself distracted by thoughts, memories, plans, worries or anything else, that’s perfectly normal. Your mind might keep circling back to whatever stressful situation you’re dealing with right now, which is fine. But when you notice you are distracted, just keep gently bringing your attention back to your body, back to the breath

• As you breathe in, know you’re breathing in. As you breathe out, know you’re breathing out

• Keep breathing deeply for another minute

• Now let’s add another element to this practice – as you breathe in, visualise a soothing colour. For some people that might be pink, purple, blue, green or gold, but just pick a colour that seems soothing for you

• And as you breathe in, imagine you are breathing in your soothing colour. See it travel in through your nostrils and down your throat, as it fills your lungs, chest, back and belly

• See your whole torso light up with this warm, gently soothing colour. Enjoy that for a minute

• Then on the out-breath, imagine you are expelling all that stressful energy – again, pick a colour that best represents your stressful feelings, which might be black, grey, red or some other strong colour

• As you breathe out, imagine exhaling every molecule of stress, blowing it out through your mouth like smoke, so it leaves your body for good and vanishes into the atmosphere

• Breathing in your soothing colour, breathing out your stress… Stay with that for a minute

• Again, if you get distracted it’s fine, just gently bring your attention back to your body, back to the breath, back to those colours flowing in and out for another minute

• Now you can let go of visualising the breath in this way and allow your breathing to find its natural rhythm

• Let go of all efforts and just sit, peacefully, feeling a sense of calm, ease and relaxation in your body and mind. Just enjoy that for a minute

• Then bring your focus to the weight of your body resting on the chair. Your feet on the ground. Sounds reaching your ears from all around

• Then when you’re ready, slowly open your eyes

• Now re-engage with the external world, carrying these feelings of calm, contentment and peace into the rest of your day

I hope you find that helpful – I will record this practice soon and add it to my Insight Timer collection, so you can listen whenever you need to de-stress and find a little calm and peace in your day.

Sending you love and warm thoughts,

Dan