Stress: How to De-Stress without Doing Less (8 page)

Figure 8: Emotion sparks and emotional fires

How do emotional fires start? In essence, they happen when something about the kind of person we are and the way we approach the world makes us more prone to certain unhelpful ways of thinking (these are covered in detail in Chapter 10). Remember, a key part of an emotional experience is the thoughts that it triggers – thoughts that start us off analysing what caused the emotion in the first place. Too often, however, the initial thoughts linked with the emotion spark can then trigger a load of other, less helpful thoughts. Imagine your brain triggers an emotion to alert you to the fact that you have not yet finished a report due in tomorrow. You feel anxious and find yourself thinking about the report, how it needs doing, what might happen if you cannot get it finished in time. But often these anxious thoughts can then trigger others. What about that other project you have to work on? What if you end up late with that one too? What if your boss just thinks you are totally useless? Remember how you did that report last week and he thought it was dreadful? What if that happens again?

Sometimes these thoughts can trigger weaknesses in what you think of yourself (see Chapter 11 on self-esteem) – ‘I'm so useless, I can never get anything done on time!' or ‘I always make a hash of these things!' – or beliefs and pressures that we put on ourselves – ‘I must get everything right or I am not good enough!' or ‘I should be able to get this done without any help.' The key thing is that these kinds of thoughts are a bit like kindling. If you are prone to thinking in certain ways, then it is rather like lighting a match in the middle of a dry forest in a hot summer. One tiny spark of emotion can easily set fire to these thoughts, creating a much bigger emotion that is more difficult to deal with.

Looking at the spark/fire model of emotions, we can quickly see that there are two ways in which emotions could start to become problematic and leave us vulnerable to trying to suppress them. The first is if there are just too many – if our brain is triggering too many sparks. This can happen if something about the way we live our life means we have a lot of rules or goals that our brain is trying to keep track of. They may be things we believe about ourselves or things that are related to the world around us, but they mean our brain is constantly having to grab our attention, resulting in a lot of emotion sparks. The second problem is if emotion sparks are then building up into emotional fires. This happens if, again as a result of what life has taught us so far, we tend to think in certain ways or hold certain beliefs about the world that act in a negative way, building up blazes of negative emotion. We'll look at this in more detail in Chapter 10.

Understanding our emotions enables us to start the journey of changing the way stress affects us. Ultimately though, the key to managing our emotions is to learn to treat them as what they are: useful warning flags that alert our attention to things and help to colour our judgments. But we are always going to struggle with this if our emotions are out of control. It's much better to prevent fires than to have to fight them. The next step, therefore, is to move on and look at the patterns of thinking and belief that can be behind troublesome emotions.

Before we move on from looking at how negative emotions affect us, we need to look at one example of an emotion that we could say causes more problems than any other. This emotion is at the root of many mental health problems, including obsessive compulsive disorder and phobias, and it is even implicated in other conditions such as eating disorders and self-harm. It can cause and trigger other problems but it can also be the problem itself. It has the power to control our lives and to back us into a corner as we retreat ever further away from things that seem to make it worse. It is the only emotion to have its own category in the clinical manual used by psychologists to diagnose psychological illnesses. Most importantly, because of the hormones and chemical reactions it triggers, it is one of the emotions most strongly linked with stress. It is anxiety.

Anxiety is a very powerful and unpleasant emotion. Of course, there are good reasons for this. If emotions in general are designed to trigger our attention, perhaps more than any other anxiety needs to be something that
forces
us to pay attention. Anxiety is triggered when there is a chance that a situation playing out around us will lead to an outcome that is unwanted for us or that risks something very precious to us. Anxiety can be a very intense, instant reaction that causes us to react instinctively without thinking – for
example, if we (or someone we care about) are in personal danger. Or it can be something that burns more slowly in the background: a base level of unpleasant emotion that never quite goes away.

Anxiety can have a clear root cause and trigger. Someone who has been in a bad car accident might struggle with severe anxiety about driving a car again, suffer panic attacks when on motorways and find it takes a lot of work to get back into driving again. Just as often, however, anxiety can be apparently inexplicable, as in the case of bizarre but very powerful phobias.

Anxiety and the worst case scenario

The first step in understanding anxiety is to look at how it forms and at something quite unique in the way we instinctively respond to it that tends to make things much worse. At the root of any episode of anxiety is what I call the worst case scenario (WCS) – that thing that we fear might happen, that we dread happening, that we want to stop happening. So we become anxious because there is something we are worried might happen – an essential element for anxiety is uncertainty. Anxiety is triggered when our brain detects that something happening around us, or something we are doing, might be linked to increasing the risk of this WCS happening. Sometimes this is because we have had a bad experience of it happening before. Sometimes it is an automatic instinctive fear that something bad will happen. Or it has been suggested that a tendency to be scared of some things is innate – being scared of spiders or snakes, for example. We don't know why, and we don't have to have had a bad experience ourselves, we just know
that something bad might happen if we go near them.

The classic response to fear is to start straight away to avoid the thing that has been linked in our minds with the WCS. I'll use an example from my own life to show what I mean. When I was about seven, I was stuck in a lift with my family during a power cut in a hotel in Italy. It was a pretty short experience – my parents say it actually lasted only minutes – but I still remember it vividly, and from almost that day on I started to avoid going in lifts if I possibly could. This continued right up into my twenties, by which time I only ever went in lifts if I absolutely had to. I had developed quite a significant phobia of lifts. So, what was my WCS? It was about getting stuck in a lift again, but actually it was more general than that – something about being in an enclosed space I couldn't get out of. And what was my reaction? To avoid going in lifts.

Of course, I started to avoid lifts because I wanted to avoid being that anxious – I was trying to make things better. And it seems the obvious thing to do: if something makes you anxious and you don't like being anxious, avoid that thing! The trouble is that as soon as I started to avoid lifts, something strange happened. You see, humans like to believe they are in control of the world around them. Once we start to avoid the feared thing, somehow our brain immediately starts to believe that we are personally stopping the WCS it is linked to from happening. I started to believe that the only reason I never got stuck in a lift was because I never went in one. The problem is that this also forms the belief that if you ever
don't
control that feared thing, the WCS
will
happen. So, as I quickly found out, avoiding lifts actually made me
more
scared of them. At first I just didn't like them but would go in if I had to. Pretty soon though, having to go in a lift
filled me with terror. Even now, years after I have worked through my own phobia, I still start to sweat ever so slightly in that moment when the lift has stopped at the floor and the doors haven't started to open yet.

Growing anxiety

Anxiety is an emotion that quickly spreads like a forest fire, eating up more and more of our life without us realizing. Very often we find ourselves starting to avoid more and more things in a desperate attempt to control our fears. The things that trigger that anxiety can grow, meaning that it gradually affects more of our life. In my case, as my anxiety grew, I found that bit by bit other small spaces were starting to make me feel anxious and I started to feel the desire to avoid them too.

Here's another example of how anxiety can grow once we start to try to run away from it. A natural anxiety, and one that many people will admit to being a bit paranoid about, is having someone break into our car. So, when we leave the car, we are careful to lock it, which should decrease the anxiety. But one day, feeling a bit more anxious than usual (maybe it was a dodgy area, or maybe we had just had a hard day so were a bit more vulnerable to anxiety than usual), we find ourselves checking the driver's door is locked after we have pressed the magic button to lock it. Then, knowing it is definitely locked, we move on. Anxiety dealt with. We've all done it!

What anxiety does, however, is make us start to worry. From that moment on something somewhere inside us is not satisfied unless we check that driver's door every time we lock the car. Somewhere in our head we have started to
believe that the WCS (having our car broken into) might happen if we do not complete that extra check. We never needed to check before but now somehow it feels as if we should and the anxiety doesn't go away until we do. Now, luckily for most of us, that is as far as it goes. But if for some reason we are more prone to anxiety than others, or if we are having a hard time and are generally very anxious (say, if we are under stress), we might find ourselves much more vulnerable to this anxiety. And one night, you absentmindedly, barely aware of doing it, we check the boot as well. Suddenly we find that the anxiety only diminishes if we check both from that moment on – the door and the boot. Otherwise we cannot relax and enjoy whatever it is we are doing once we have left the car. Anxiety rarely stays still, and if we are not careful, it will win ground off us and gradually back us into a corner.

Anxiety like this can very easily tie us in knots. It can restrict our lives, and because the anxiety grows with every step we take to try to escape and run away from it, it can start to cause real problems. People with severe phobias find their life utterly controlled by them. Conditions can form, such as Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), in which people find themselves caught in beliefs that if they do not complete certain series of checks or actions, very serious worst case scenarios will happen. For people suffering from OCD, these rituals, designed in an attempt to keep anxiety at bay, often start to take over their life. So, as it increases, anxiety can make us much more prone to stress, and it can worsen a problem with stress that we already have.

Another key way in which anxiety can cause problems is if we actually fail to pick up that it is anxiety we are experiencing. Because anxiety is such a physical condition,
all too often people can find that they mistake the physical symptoms for something else. So, anxiety is triggered and starts to cause physical symptoms such as increased heart rate or hyperventilating (taking lots of small shallow breaths). These things start to cause their own symptoms before long. We become aware of our heart racing even though we are not exercising. Then, as the fast breathing changes the chemistry of our blood (as the levels of oxygen and carbon dioxide change), that also causes symptoms such as dizziness, tingling in fingers or toes and even chest pain. If we did not realize that the trigger of these things was anxiety, this would be really frightening. We might start to worry that we were really ill, perhaps having a heart attack, or that we were going to pass out. Of course, that fear just makes the anxiety (and therefore the symptoms) worse. Pretty soon we are sweating too, wild-eyed and panicked. This is how a panic attack develops, and anyone who has ever had one or witnessed one will tell you just how ‘physical' it looks and feels. It really does feel as if something is dreadfully physically wrong. But it is ‘just' anxiety. I say ‘just' because anxiety can be a very powerful and manipulative emotion, and the physical effects are real – they just aren't what you might think they are.

What makes some people more prone to anxiety than others?

Certain personality profiles make us more vulnerable to feeling anxious, perhaps because we build more rules and regulations into our lives (see Chapter 9 on personality). Or we might have had experiences in our childhood that make us more susceptible to anxiety as we try to avoid similar things happening again, or because that extreme stress
experienced when we were young has actually affected our biological response to anxiety. Remember that emotions are triggered when our brains detect significant combinations of things going on around us. If, for whatever reason, our brain triggers more anxiety than most people's, we are more likely to end up reacting to it in that way that makes things worse.

Something else that affects how prone we are to anxiety problems is how well we tolerate the experience of anxiety. Some people do not mind feeling a bit anxious. In fact, they almost thrive on that experience of stress. They might describe themselves as ‘adrenaline junkies' (adrenaline is one of the hormones released as part of anxiety that controls the whole physical experience it triggers) and love to do things where they are operating under pressure. Most people perform better with a little bit of anxiety because adrenaline helps us to concentrate and boosts our performance. But some people totally and utterly hate the experience of anxiety. This may be because they have had all too many experiences where it has built up and become overwhelming – perhaps in panic attacks or phobic reactions. They get to the stage where the slightest anxiety is terrifying and they will do anything to avoid feeling anxious. It's as if experiencing that first anxiety spark immediately triggers another because their brain links that feeling to something that has previously been a very bad experience. So, it triggers more anxiety… which triggers more anxiety… and so on. For these people anxiety builds up incredibly fast and becomes overwhelming, and many end up almost imprisoned in their own homes as they desperately try to avoid all the triggers for their anxiety.

So, if we are feeling trapped by our fears, what can we do about it?

The most effective treatment for any anxiety problem is to turn around and face it. Did you ever have a parent or sibling who used to chase you up the stairs when you were younger? Even though you knew who it was, it was somehow scary! Everything is more scary when we are running away from it, and anxiety is no different. If something makes us really scared, the best way to deal with it is to take back control and, instead of avoiding it, start to deliberately face up to it. Of course, if you have a severe phobia or struggle with really intense fear, you will need some help with this and it is possible to be referred to a psychologist or CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) specialist who can help you to work through your fears and win some of that ground back bit by bit.

The point of facing your fears is to start to retrain your brain. We need to teach it that actually, even if we are exposed to that so feared thing, the worst case scenario doesn't necessarily happen. We gradually need to build up experiences in which we do expose ourselves to that feared stimulus without anything bad actually happening. Bit by bit our brain will start to learn that it simply doesn't need to trigger that extreme fear reaction every time we are in that position.

Of course, treatment doesn't usually make you face your worst fears straight away, and if you are trying to work things out on your own, it's important that you don't jump right in with the thing that terrifies you most. It's about working out the most sensible step you can take without risking trying to jump too far and failing – because that can make the fear feel stronger. Most therapists will ask you to make a list of the
things that would trigger your fear, starting with the most scary and working backwards. So, to return to the example of my own lift phobia, the worst thing would have been going in one of those scary car-park lifts that look really scary and have no windows (you know, the big metal ones). Working back from there, I could make a list of things that got a bit easier with each step. Lifts in busy areas are less scary, as are those with big windows. Lifts with just a few people in are not too bad, but cramming people in like sardines makes any lift worse. You keep making this list until you have got down to the smallest step that you can think of that relates to your fear. When I started to tackle my lift phobia, the first thing I would do was stand and watch people going in and out of lifts and just note in my head that none of them got stuck. It was a small step but it started me winning ground back off the anxiety. Gradually I was able to start to go in lifts myself (the non-scary ones at first!), and bit by bit the anxiety started to go down.