What are anxious feelings telling us?

Every Saturday morning, while my wife is running the wool shop that so many of my videos are recorded in, I take my daughter to cycling practice.

Here she is, nailing a corner that gives me (a staunch roadie) the heebie-jeebies, just to look at. (What does that tell you about how we experience the world, eh? 🤔)

Anyway, she totally loves it. Gets to hang out with her cycling buddies she only sees once a week, always learns some new skill to show off later, comes away brimming with confidence, and if she plays her cards right (and I get my act together before we leave) has hot chocolate in a flask, waiting for her at the end.

Cycling practice is awesome.

But you know what? In spite of this unfailingly brilliant experience each and every week (she’s never once not enjoyed it immensely), in the van on the way there, each and every week, unfailingly, she says,

“Dad, I’m nervous.”

This experience of anxiety has evolved over the years. When we first started going, it was so bad that she couldn’t eat breakfast for feeling sick and used to beg me not to take her (in spite of her loving every moment, every time she went).

Then for a while it would be ok until we were about half way there, and she’d ask me to turn back.

Then for a time, upon arrival, awash with anxiety she’d sit in the van and not want to get out.

And most recently it only happens as we crest the first speed bump on the little road down to the outdoor centre, just as we arrive, and doesn’t really bother her.

But still, every single time:

“Dad, I’m nervous.”

Now, what d’you make of that? What can her anxious feelings be telling her, here? They don’t seem to have any basis in reality, because they’re completely at odds with the experience she knows she’s had, every time she’s been before.

And if I quiz her, she can’t even put a finger on what it is she’s nervous about – just cycling practice in general.

It’s different with us grown ups though, isn’t it?

Our much more developed brains, that have experienced so much more and been exposed to years and years of conditioning (and fear-mongering media), have absolutely no problem whatsoever in providing us with a MASSIVE LONG LIST of all the things we’re anxious ‘about’, when we get that familiar feeling.

(It happens to me too; it happens to everyone.)

So here’s something for you to consider. Just for a moment, put aside what you think you know about anxiety and consider that the feeling isn’t actually telling you anything useful about what you’re thinking (i.e. what it looks like you're anxious about) … but instead is a super-helpful pointer to something more fundamental:

What if it's saying,

“My love, you've slipped out of reality and you're attached to a story. Come back to the present, where life's actually happening!”

(You know, that same ‘present’ where you have clarity and perspective and you feel resourceful and connected to common sense and intuition and other people and you're not busy over-thinking things unnecessarily – yeah that ‘present’!)

😯

Because that’s an entirely different kettle of fish, isn't it? A bit of a game-changer, really.

What would that mean for you?

Well, how about this? It would mean that you don’t have to take any of that thinking seriously.

And that you don’t have to act on it.

It’s just a mind doing what a mind does – spewing out its predictions, based on all the crap it’s collected over the years, when faced with the unknown (‘the unknown’ being all of life)!

This is what I’ve been pointing my daughter to all the time we’ve been driving to cycling practice on a Saturday morning, and as time goes by, the feelings have less and less power over her and are gradually fading.

In fact these days, we have a little joke about it –

“Speed bumps! The anxiety must be coming from the speed bumps! Because that’s when it happens!”

The anxious feelings are fading, not because she’s doing anything about them, but because it’s just making less and less sense to pay them much attention. And they’re going away on their own.

As they will for you, too.

💟

Giles 

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