Wrapping Our Arms Around Anxiety
This week, I’m sharing an article I wrote for Spirituality & Health magazine in collaboration with a wonderful psychotherapist and author, Andrea Wachter, who teaches many easy and effective practices to ease stress, anxiety, and overwhelm. Andrea will be leading our free “Quest for Calm—Practices to Ease Anxiety” workshop tomorrow, which will be a rare opportunity to work with her live. It takes just seconds to sign up, and everyone who registers will receive the recording. Please join us, and share the information with anyone you think could benefit. Thank you!
I recently took my first vacation since the pandemic began. As someone who feels claustrophobic in airports and on airplanes, just the thought of wearing an N95 mask throughout a 6-hour flight made me anxious. I’d been dreading it for months.
At the airport on the big day, I remained calm until it was announced that because of an irreparable technical problem, they’d need to bring in a new plane. Our flight was delayed indefinitely. A powerful wave of anxiety overtook me. I was lightheaded and on the edge of panic.
Fortunately, I’d recently taken a “Practical Tools for Anxiety Relief” class on the Insight Timer meditation app taught by psychotherapist and author, Andrea Wachter. Wachter teaches a wide variety of practices to help people step off the path of anxiety—and they work! That day in the airport, I immediately began to apply what I’d learned. Calming down quickly, I felt both grounded and relieved.
Myra having a great time whale watching in Maui with her husband Drew (left), son Jeff, and Jeff’s fiancée Kyra.
Wachter knows firsthand how torturous anxiety can feel, and she’s passionate about sharing effective tools to help people cope with it. Her courses are extremely popular, and her guided meditations have been downloaded more than 3 million times.
Q&A With Andrea Wachter: Anxiety vs. Fear
Myra Goodman: How do you define anxiety, and how does anxiety differ from fear?
Andrea Wachter: All humans feel fear. It’s an essential internal warning system—our natural and healthy response when we perceive danger. Fear is experienced in the present moment, while anxiety is usually future-focused. Anxiety is more about what if than what is, imagining impending scary scenarios. Fear and anxiety can feel very similar. They both create the chemical cocktail of cortisol and adrenaline that flood our bodies when our fight-or-flight response is activated.
Andrea Wachter
What about anxiety related to a situation that’s not conjecture? Say you or a loved one is diagnosed with a disease and needs to undergo treatment with an uncertain outcome.
Many of the tools I teach help people to feel and honor their emotions, soothe themselves, and come back to the present moment. If someone has to endure a difficult treatment, it’s better to go through it once, when it’s actually happening, instead of a million times in their mind.
An important reason to develop an anti-anxiety toolkit is that it’s always there to support you, no matter what comes your way. And these practices have the added benefits of improving your sleep, digestion, and immune system.
Personally, when I feel anxiety, all I want to do is run from it. But that just makes the anxiety accelerate.
That is a very common and understandable response, but because running is a fight-or-flight reaction, we need to learn to soothe our nervous systems when anxiety strikes. Feeling afraid of anxiety, and desperately trying to get rid of it as soon as possible, only fuels it.
I try to help people move toward their anxiety like they might move toward a small child who is scared. When we’re anxious, we need love, comfort, and compassion—not rejection, condemnation, or shame. Judging ourselves and hating how we feel just makes things worse.
That said, not everyone is ready to fully face their anxiety. They may need professional support to work through some of their residual traumas first. But all of us need to avoid the trap of trying to escape our anxiety by indulging in self-destructive habits.
