Anxiety and Confidence
““Avoiding fear creates anxiety. At the heart of every chronic anxiety issue is a simple process: When you try to eliminate or run away from fear, you teach your brain to be afraid of fear itself. In the long-run, this makes you chronically anxious. If you immediately “attack” or “flee” from your fear anytime it comes up, your brain is understandably going to start thinking of fear itself as a threat and danger. This means it’s going to be increasingly on guard and hypervigilant to anything that might make you anxious or afraid. And if it finds something, it’s going to make you even more anxious!””
I read Nick Wignall’s “4 Habits of Highly Confident People” article in Medium and despite the rest of the really well-written article on confidence, the above quote just jumped out at me about anxiety. (Read the entire article to help build confidence!)
It is so important.
The article actually starts this way:
“When most people think of the word confidence, they associate it with a lack of fear or self-doubt. They look on in wonder, for example, at that confident coworker who seems to just speak their mind without a care in the world for what other people think. And while it’s true that confident people often feel less anxious than the rest of us, there’s more to the story of highly confident people: Confidence isn’t the absence of fear. It’s the belief that you’ll be okay despite your fear. In other words, confident people haven’t figured out how to eliminate fear — they’ve changed their relationship to it.”
Anxiety has taken over the mental attics of people’s lives. I often half “jokingly” say that I am going to start keeping a list of people who don’t have anxiety than ones who do. What is going on? I have some hunches but the jury is still out on. I think what Nick writes has a lot of merit. From my study on the topic, the brain has to be trained or taught to overcome the overwhelming power of anxiety. Now don’t get me wrong; I am not again medicines. In fact, I am in favor of medicine to help alleviate the incapacity that anxiety creates. However, not just medicine alone. Medicine can buy some time while a person spend the time and makes the effort to train the brain not to allow an amygdala highjacking whenever it so wants to.
One of my favorite books that helped me better understand the power of the workings of the brain is Dr. Jeffery Swartz’s You Are Not Your Brain. Swartz provides the insights needed to better understand what is going inside our 3 pound center of our universe and to better shape how it responds to the highjackings it often seeks.
In Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, the Heath brothers use the imagery of an elephant, the rider, and the path. (Here is a great, short video explaining it) The elephant is like our emotions (I am adding where that fight or flight feeling starts from the amygdala). The rider is like our mind or our thinking, rational self (that know that the the feeling is just a feeling but just can’t stop the panic attack). And the path is how you shape your environment so that the rider can actually control the elephant, which without a path there would be no way to stop a huge elephant from running amuck.
(I recently watched a TikTok video of a guy explaining the same principle using a car when talking about how to help young children grow up. He said that the emotions are like the gas pedal. Kids are born with that but not steering wheel or brakes. Child rearing is helping kids and teenagers learn how to drive their lives, controlling the powerful emotions (which are good but can cause one to crash and burn OR throw a temper tantrum), by developing the skills to steer (rational thinking, directions, goals, etc) and to brake. I really like that. When a two year throws a fit, it’s just that she doesn’t have a steering wheel or any brakes yet to stop the emotional car from going out of control. We have to have patience with toddlers and with teens and adults as we all learn how to control the powerful elephants deep inside our brains. We are not the sum total of what the messages from our inner brains tell us. We have to learn how to use our brakes and steering wheels to stay on the road (path) we before us.
It is not a quick fix. It is a lot of work. It takes a lot of time, maybe years or even a lifetime (It may just be how some humans are wired) It may require seeking professional help and medicine, along with spiritual practices that can aid in shaping the path toward a better future.
One step at a time! We can do it.
