Solution for a specific type of anxiety.
August 30, 2023 8:24 PM Subscribe
I’m usually good at redirecting, countering, or dismissing anxious thoughts, but there’s one type of anxiety I’m not sure how to solve. Every once in a while, something legitimately scary happens in life. That sensation is so shocking and unpleasant that my body tenses up for a long time to prevent that shock from happening again, the same way you’d walk around with tense stomach muscles if someone occasionally punched you in the gut by surprise. How do people not do this?
If you are someone who naturally doesn’t react this way and so has no advice, I’m still very curious to hear what your experience is like.
If you are someone who naturally doesn’t react this way and so has no advice, I’m still very curious to hear what your experience is like.
This post was deleted for the following reason: -- Brandon Blatcher
Response by poster: I’m talking about the sort of scary things that happen to everyone, though - so I don’t see how it would be trauma. Things like narrowly avoiding injury or finding out that someone important to you is ill/injured/dead.
posted by wheatlets at 8:30 PM on August 30, 2023
posted by wheatlets at 8:30 PM on August 30, 2023
Yes, that's a normal human reaction to a stressful event. It can get outsized, or last longer than "normal," but it's a reasonable emotional response to an upsetting event. What can happen that fuels anxiety is that we get anxious about reasonable responses and it's the anxiety about the anxious feelings that get us stuck. Often if you can work to recognize the initial feeling as ok, that can short-circuit that cycle.
posted by lapis at 8:43 PM on August 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by lapis at 8:43 PM on August 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
What sort of timescale are you talking about? Hours? Days? Months?
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:44 PM on August 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 8:44 PM on August 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
Reading about the stress cycle, and specifically ways to complete the stress cycle, has been very helpful to me.
When I have this type of reaction (and I agree with the others above, it can be a normal reaction, but it's very unpleasant), physical exercise has helped "shake" me out of that state. I usually go for a short run if it's appropriate to the context; I've been known to do jumping jacks in the bathroom of my office at other times.
posted by third word on a random page at 8:46 PM on August 30, 2023 [6 favorites]
When I have this type of reaction (and I agree with the others above, it can be a normal reaction, but it's very unpleasant), physical exercise has helped "shake" me out of that state. I usually go for a short run if it's appropriate to the context; I've been known to do jumping jacks in the bathroom of my office at other times.
posted by third word on a random page at 8:46 PM on August 30, 2023 [6 favorites]
Yes that's a normal reaction to risk and emotional shock, and it's precisely why people who are expected to encounter these situations of danger and respond to them (e.g. firefighters, paramedics, and most of all, soldiers and members of the military) train by drilling, repeatedly, in simulated environments, made as realistic as they can, to desensitise themselves.
For you or I, and almost everyone, a situation like 'both the engines have failed!' would be cause for extreme anxiety, but for an aircraft pilot it's simply the cue to run through a known drill.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:02 PM on August 30, 2023 [5 favorites]
For you or I, and almost everyone, a situation like 'both the engines have failed!' would be cause for extreme anxiety, but for an aircraft pilot it's simply the cue to run through a known drill.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 9:02 PM on August 30, 2023 [5 favorites]
Feeling upset after something legitimately upsetting happens is, as others have said, normal. Yucky, but normal. In my experience, it helps if you can have a safe place or person to go to afterward and have a little freak-out where you vent and/or cry it out. In other words, accept the burst of terror, and trust that the overwhelm will pass (it will). After that, I like to go for a walk in nature. Some people prefer to do intense exercise. And there is good evidence that playing Tetris or other puzzly games in the immediate aftermath can stop your brain from perseverating on memories of the event.
posted by (F)utility at 9:43 PM on August 30, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by (F)utility at 9:43 PM on August 30, 2023 [3 favorites]
There are two sorts of pathways the human body can use to restore back to homeostasis, and some of us use the neurotransmitters and pathways that work quickly and some of us use the neurotransmitters and pathways that work slowly. Sounds like you got the slow set.
Basically your sympathetic nervous system takes over easily and lets go reluctantly. Your parasympathetic nervous system which is supposed to calm you down, starts sluggishly and chokes back easily. If I understand the theory correctly, you are someone who produces lower amounts of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. This is an individual difference, the same way someone else might produce lots of dopamine compared to average and be less sensitive to pain when they go into a lab and get tested with pin pricks. Those neurotransmitters have a lot of influence on our personalities. These tendencies are innate and lifelong.
There's a lot of things you can do to try to trigger the process of calming down and getting rid of stress hormone, but you probably know about all of them. Things like running for your tribe and telling them all about it, or eating comfort food, or getting hugs, or practicing slow deep breathing or take a hot bath, or reading a funny book can all make you relax faster. But they will be much more effective for some people than for others. It's not that they know how to do it instinctively, it's that it works fast for them and slowly for you and they may not even need to employ such aids. Practice and training can help, but only to a degree.
There are theoretical advantages to being someone like you, like the fact that you are less likely to bleed to death than someone of the other sort, because that tension you feel after something bad happens restricts your blood vessels from dilating. You can probably figure out some more advantages, like that you are probably not the kind of person to do stupid impulsive things.
Someone who knows more about this will probably have several corrections to make because I am explaining it badly.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:45 PM on August 30, 2023 [4 favorites]
Basically your sympathetic nervous system takes over easily and lets go reluctantly. Your parasympathetic nervous system which is supposed to calm you down, starts sluggishly and chokes back easily. If I understand the theory correctly, you are someone who produces lower amounts of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. This is an individual difference, the same way someone else might produce lots of dopamine compared to average and be less sensitive to pain when they go into a lab and get tested with pin pricks. Those neurotransmitters have a lot of influence on our personalities. These tendencies are innate and lifelong.
There's a lot of things you can do to try to trigger the process of calming down and getting rid of stress hormone, but you probably know about all of them. Things like running for your tribe and telling them all about it, or eating comfort food, or getting hugs, or practicing slow deep breathing or take a hot bath, or reading a funny book can all make you relax faster. But they will be much more effective for some people than for others. It's not that they know how to do it instinctively, it's that it works fast for them and slowly for you and they may not even need to employ such aids. Practice and training can help, but only to a degree.
There are theoretical advantages to being someone like you, like the fact that you are less likely to bleed to death than someone of the other sort, because that tension you feel after something bad happens restricts your blood vessels from dilating. You can probably figure out some more advantages, like that you are probably not the kind of person to do stupid impulsive things.
Someone who knows more about this will probably have several corrections to make because I am explaining it badly.
posted by Jane the Brown at 9:45 PM on August 30, 2023 [4 favorites]
Something else just occurred to me. Maybe you're talking about wanting to increase your distress tolerance. Because that's a skill that can be learned.
posted by (F)utility at 9:51 PM on August 30, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by (F)utility at 9:51 PM on August 30, 2023 [4 favorites]
Every once in a while, something legitimately scary happens in life. That sensation is so shocking and unpleasant that my body tenses up for a long time to prevent that shock from happening again, the same way you’d walk around with tense stomach muscles if someone occasionally punched you in the gut by surprise.
This is a good description of what I think of as PTSD.
When you have PTSD, you can have a response to an anticipated bad event ‘preloaded', if you will, such that the response must constantly be actively suppressed in order to keep it from being manifested in your actions.
Take a look at this video made by an anesthesiologist who sees PTSD reactions as some of his patients wake up from the anesthesia, but before they are in full control.
There are many strategies for resolving PTSD, including ketamine therapy, which strikes me as the most forceful and direct approach, but perhaps also as one of the riskier.
posted by jamjam at 12:59 AM on August 31, 2023 [1 favorite]
This is a good description of what I think of as PTSD.
When you have PTSD, you can have a response to an anticipated bad event ‘preloaded', if you will, such that the response must constantly be actively suppressed in order to keep it from being manifested in your actions.
Take a look at this video made by an anesthesiologist who sees PTSD reactions as some of his patients wake up from the anesthesia, but before they are in full control.
There are many strategies for resolving PTSD, including ketamine therapy, which strikes me as the most forceful and direct approach, but perhaps also as one of the riskier.
posted by jamjam at 12:59 AM on August 31, 2023 [1 favorite]
I have a close family member who experiences this, and over many years of discussion the distinctions between us that we've identified as feeling significant are that they both much more strongly prefer their days/weeks/months/years to be similar to one another, and that they have a stronger underlying belief in their ability to see patterns of events in everyday life and predict outcomes. This means that both the initial occurrence of the frightening thing hurts them in a specific way it probably wouldn't have hurt me (that is, the "disruption" itself, regardless of what actually happened: even unexpected good things require some degree of "coping" for them), and that afterwards they are perpetually subconsciously looking for the "pattern" that will make the event predictable after all. Since they don't know what the pattern was, it's distressing that anything could be related and their brain is constantly considering all sorts of possible variables that look like partial matches. Me, I shrug and say "infinite universe is infinite: if there was a way of predicting it, it's beyond my processing capacity" and I truly let go of any sense that I could/should have known. How precisely I'm able to do that, it's hard to say. For many years, I actually was in an environment where someone did the equivalent of "randomly"punching me in the stomach, and then I definitely did so the pattern-matching thing and built up a whole model of them in my head such that I could pretty reliably anticipate their reaction to anything. Maybe the repeated nature of the event, however, was what fed me enough data to be able to do that, whereas with more truly random things, I'm able to rationally say that they're highly unlikely to recur the same way so there's no reason to save that data and keep watching for other incidents that appear to match it. This is not at all to diminish your experiences, just speculation about what's going on in my head when such things happen to me and I move on without significant lingering impact.
posted by teremala at 3:59 AM on August 31, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by teremala at 3:59 AM on August 31, 2023 [3 favorites]
Meditation
Massage
Gentle exercise
A warm bath
Playing Tetris
posted by kinddieserzeit at 5:43 AM on August 31, 2023
Massage
Gentle exercise
A warm bath
Playing Tetris
posted by kinddieserzeit at 5:43 AM on August 31, 2023
Things like narrowly avoiding injury or finding out that someone important to you is ill/injured/dead.
Don't take this as flip or anything, but these are literally the very kinds of events included in the original and most narrow definitions of trauma back when it started percolating into mainstream culture in the 90s. That means your reactions - which others have pointed out are less "anxiety" and more "fear" or "stress" - very likely fit the situation, even if the intensity/duration seem disproportionate to you.
Things you can do to address it include 1) doing something physical; 2) doing something ritual; and 3) doing something not-by-yourself. As you noted, you experience this in a physiological way, so 1) meets that aspect of the experience. And it doesn't have to be just exercise or exertive (though this can and does help many people) - literally anything that requires the engagement of your body through movement, gesture, etc is worth trying. This ties into 2), which addresses the symbolic dimension of human experience. Injury and death are scary because they're painful and in some ways difficult to really comprehend at a deep-down gut level. Support groups or even short-term group therapy centered around particular issues (e.g. trauma) may help with that by metabolizing the cognitive-affective aspects of the experience. And depending on the communities you belong to, there will likely be other ritual-type activities that you could find and join.
And at this point we've already started running into 3), because we do not come into this world on our own, nor do we move through it on our own (even if it feels that way sometimes, often times even). As you said yourself, these are the sort of scary things that happen to everyone, so I bet you'll find that a lot of people can relate at some level or other.
posted by obliterati at 8:05 AM on August 31, 2023
Don't take this as flip or anything, but these are literally the very kinds of events included in the original and most narrow definitions of trauma back when it started percolating into mainstream culture in the 90s. That means your reactions - which others have pointed out are less "anxiety" and more "fear" or "stress" - very likely fit the situation, even if the intensity/duration seem disproportionate to you.
Things you can do to address it include 1) doing something physical; 2) doing something ritual; and 3) doing something not-by-yourself. As you noted, you experience this in a physiological way, so 1) meets that aspect of the experience. And it doesn't have to be just exercise or exertive (though this can and does help many people) - literally anything that requires the engagement of your body through movement, gesture, etc is worth trying. This ties into 2), which addresses the symbolic dimension of human experience. Injury and death are scary because they're painful and in some ways difficult to really comprehend at a deep-down gut level. Support groups or even short-term group therapy centered around particular issues (e.g. trauma) may help with that by metabolizing the cognitive-affective aspects of the experience. And depending on the communities you belong to, there will likely be other ritual-type activities that you could find and join.
And at this point we've already started running into 3), because we do not come into this world on our own, nor do we move through it on our own (even if it feels that way sometimes, often times even). As you said yourself, these are the sort of scary things that happen to everyone, so I bet you'll find that a lot of people can relate at some level or other.
posted by obliterati at 8:05 AM on August 31, 2023
The other concept you might be looking for is shock. As in, "that car nearly hit me, holy shit, I'm shaking and need to go sit down" shock - there's a technical definition but that's not what you need here, you need the colloquial definition that says this is normal human experience. You can think of it as fight or flight, and your body just saw a tiger leap right where you had been standing. Traumatic events can cause it, but we often use trauma to talk about longer lasting effects so you might find it helpful to have a word for the immediate aftermath too.
And it's common to be walking around "in shock" for weeks after the death of a loved one. There are things you can do to lighten it - talk to someone, actively experience normalcy, deep hugs and hard exercise and laughter.
posted by Lady Li at 8:07 AM on August 31, 2023 [3 favorites]
And it's common to be walking around "in shock" for weeks after the death of a loved one. There are things you can do to lighten it - talk to someone, actively experience normalcy, deep hugs and hard exercise and laughter.
posted by Lady Li at 8:07 AM on August 31, 2023 [3 favorites]
If you need an immediate way to calm down, try putting cold water or an ice pack on your face. The goal here is to trigger your body’s dive reflex in order to get your body to calm down. My family has chemical ice packs around the house to use for this. It’s not a total fix, but can help a bit.
This rest of this comment might just been me projecting my own mental health weirdness. Putting it out here in case it feels relevant to you, but it may or may not:
I tend to experience anxiety in a really physical, long-lasting way (a lot like a never-ending asthma attack). But my therapist recently pointed out that I tend to use “anxiety” as a kind of catchall term for emotional discomfort. I am categorically scared of strong feelings and am not great at processing that kind of intensity.
It has been surprisingly helpful to look into the uncomfortable feelings more closely instead of trying to avoid them. Am I anxious about the possibility of losing a loved one, or am I afraid of how painful the sadness will be? Afraid that it’ll be embarrassing if people see me crying? Am I anxious about getting in an accident, or am I embarrassed that I wasn’t paying enough attention to a crowded intersection last week? or angry at the jerk who nearly ran me over making an illegal turn?
Sometimes just realizing “oh, maybe that’s actually sadness” is enough to release some of the tension. I still feel bad either way, but those more specific painful feelings are easier to process and move past than than the more generic “oh god I’m just so anxious”
posted by threecolorable at 10:20 AM on August 31, 2023 [5 favorites]
This rest of this comment might just been me projecting my own mental health weirdness. Putting it out here in case it feels relevant to you, but it may or may not:
I tend to experience anxiety in a really physical, long-lasting way (a lot like a never-ending asthma attack). But my therapist recently pointed out that I tend to use “anxiety” as a kind of catchall term for emotional discomfort. I am categorically scared of strong feelings and am not great at processing that kind of intensity.
It has been surprisingly helpful to look into the uncomfortable feelings more closely instead of trying to avoid them. Am I anxious about the possibility of losing a loved one, or am I afraid of how painful the sadness will be? Afraid that it’ll be embarrassing if people see me crying? Am I anxious about getting in an accident, or am I embarrassed that I wasn’t paying enough attention to a crowded intersection last week? or angry at the jerk who nearly ran me over making an illegal turn?
Sometimes just realizing “oh, maybe that’s actually sadness” is enough to release some of the tension. I still feel bad either way, but those more specific painful feelings are easier to process and move past than than the more generic “oh god I’m just so anxious”
posted by threecolorable at 10:20 AM on August 31, 2023 [5 favorites]
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posted by lapis at 8:28 PM on August 30, 2023 [1 favorite]