Overcoming Anxiety: 4 Steps to Living the Life You Want

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A fear of our feelings, including often stands in the way of us reaching our full potential. In this article, I’ll share the four steps to overcoming this fear and living the life you really want.

Step One: Emotional Mindfulness

In the first step, the goal is to increase our conscious awareness of our emotional experience. It starts off with becoming aware of our feelings as well as the ways in which we defend against them.

Emotional mindfulness, in part, is about becoming attuned to the signs that you’re having feelings.  It necessitates taking the time to slow down and be more mindful of what’s going on in your body and to notice the ways in which you avoid your feelings.

Step Two: Taming the Fear

The main reason why many of us avoid our feelings is because they make us anxious. They feel scary or dangerous in some way. The key to being able to move forward differently is to find a way to tame that fear.

I teach people ways to regulate their anxiety so that they can diminish it and begin to open up to their emotions. This process takes some practice but doesn’t need to feel overwhelming as it can approached one step at a time.

If we can learn how to bring our anxiety down, even just a little bit, we can then open up to our emotions. The more we do that, the less afraid that we’ll be.

Step Three: Feeling It Through

This step is all about experiencing our emotions more fully.  Contrary to what we fear, when fully felt, emotions don’t last for ever.  They’re like a wave in the ocean, with an energetic flow. They have a beginning, middle, and an end. They may start off small and rise up with intensity or they may be like ripples in a brook that gently move through us.

But many of us end up behaving defensively to avoid our feelings and do all these things to stop them in their tracks. That’s when we get stuck and we think, “Oh my gosh. They’re going to last forever.”  It’s our resistance to our feelings that prolongs distress.

The reality is that our emotions stick around longer when we do things to try to avoid them. If we’re able open up the experience and move with the energy, we’re able to feel them through and get to a better place.

Step Four: Opening Up

This step is finding a way to share our feelings with other people.  Not every feeling needs to be shared. What’s most important is that we’re in touch with them and able to make use of their wisdom and power, but often our feelings motivate us to share them in some way. It’s up to us then to evaluate whether to let others know what we’re feeling.

The idea of sharing feelings with others can be anxiety provoking for some of us. Sometimes we’re afraid about how others will react.   Here is where we can make use of some of our earlier steps (such as ‘Taming the Fear’) in order to more comfortably be able to open up and share them with others.

By following these four steps, we can open up to new experiences and move towards our greater potential in life.

The most challenging step for most people is ‘Taming the Fear’. We avoid our feelings because they’re scary. When we get to the place where we start to feel afraid again, the natural tendency can be to go back to avoiding them. Without any help, when we start to feel our anxiety again, our reflex kicks in and we tend to want to avoid them.

If you’re feeling anxious, it can be a helpful sign that you’re getting closer to your feelings. That’s actually a good thing. If you’re able to stay with it, you realize that you can tolerate it and you’re able to move forward.

When we’re able to begin to make room for our feelings, we soon learn that it’s relieving, that it provides us with clarity, a sense of truth, and that it motivates us to be able to face life’s challenges and move forward.

Then there are other people who have more of a struggle. Everyone’s different. Sometimes it can be a slower process. All that matters is that you keep at it. Even if you’re taking tiny steps, ultimately over time they build up and your tolerance and your ability to be with your emotions increases.

Learn how to live like you mean it, even when times are tough. Reserve your free copy of the 30 minute audio program, Optimal Living in Challenging Times at www.cfcliving.com/optimalliving

Dr. Ron Frederick helps people all over the world to use the wisdom and power of their emotions to get the lives they really want.

Overcoming Anxiety: the Importance of Emotional Mindfulness

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Anxiety is a common problem that plagues a lot of people.  Many times people are only remotely in touch with their feelings.  We divert our attention from our feelings by texting, surfing the net, zoning out in front of the television, or getting overly involved in work or other distractions. We may even become addicted to these an other behavior and end up at an emotional distance from those we love and care about.

It is important that we, first of all, realize that our feelings are a natural, wired in response and, if we want to get anywhere positive, we need to learn how to deal and work with our feelings, rather than against them. We need to learn how to connect with our true feelings before we can make any kind of shift in our lives.

How do I understand this dilemma so well?  Been there, done that!  For a long time, I thought that I was pretty in touch with my feelings.  But, what I learned through therapy, when I finally bottomed out, was that I was not as aware of my emotions as I had thought.  I was actually controlled by my anxiety.

At the center of my approach with anxiety is emotional mindfulness. Emotional mindfulness is about becoming more aware of and more fully present to our feelings – how we experience them, the sensations that they create, what they feel like in our bodies, how to open up to the flow of their energy, how to make the best use of them. It starts with being more in touch with our bodily experience as well as all the ways that we avoid our feelings, or what I call ‘defenses’–all the ways in which we defend against our emotional experience.

In short, defensive behaviors are attempts to get away from feeling uncomfortable when we get close to our feelings.  Many of them started early in life and have developed over many years.  They’ve become so automatic that they’re are outside of our awareness. We’re don’t even realize what we’re doing.

We don’t understand why we get busy. We just get busy. We are not aware that perhaps we have feelings that make us anxious.  We just end up going shopping, reaching for something to eat, busying ourselves at our jobs, or getting on the computer.

We don’t understand the factors that contribute to our behavior. We don’t realize that this type of behavior is really there to avoid the anxiety we feel when we get close to our feelings.

It’s critical that we slow down and begin to sensitize ourselves to our internal experience and begin to recognize all the ways in which keep ourselves from being in touch with our true feelings.

In part, I see addictive behavior as a way of regulating our anxiety and discomfort.  It’s a coping strategy.  Many of the people that I’ve worked with who are in recovery often discover just how little experience they have being present with their feeling. They notice how difficult it feels to tolerate their emotions – whether it be tolerating sadness, pain, or guilt – but also tolerating more pleasureable feelings, like love, pride, excitement, and joy.

To feel better and thrive, we need to learn how to regulate our anxiety and develop the capacity to be with ourselves emotionally so that we can step more fully into the present moment. We need to face our fears, learn how to be present with ourselves, and, ultimately, with others.  We need to stop ourselves from resorting to defensive avoidance, whether it’s using drugs, eating, going shopping, having sex, etc..

Emotional security and closeness is at the foundation of a healthy relationship. We all long to feel close and safely connected but often struggle to make this happen.  We can achieve safety and security in our lives through our feelings but it takes work.  We need to learn how to open up and reveal ourselves more fully, to share our authentic experience, to be vulnerable with our partners, to share our softer side, our needs, as well how to make healthy use of our anger and share it in a positive and productive way.  When we learn to do these things, when we learn to face our fears, our anxiety will begin to melt and give way to a fuller, richer life.

Learn how to live like you mean it, even when times are tough. Reserve your free copy of the 30 minute audio program, Optimal Living in Challenging Times at www.cfcliving.com/optimalliving

Dr. Ron Frederick helps people all over the world to use the wisdom and power of their emotions to get the lives they really want.

Avoiding Your Feelings? Find out Why and What to Do About It

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Why do people tend to avoid feeling their feelings? It has everything to do with our early experience in life – what we learned and what we didn’t learn. As I talk to people across the nation, most people agree that they didn’t really learn how to make good use of their feelings when they were growing up. What they did learn was how to avoid certain feelings.

• “It’s not okay to be angry.”
• “Don’t feel excited about yourself.”

These are the some of the common messages that we heard about our feelings.  But, what about how to make good use of our feelings?  Unfortunately, we didn’t get that primer.

In recent years, through the field of affective neuroscience and child development, we have learned a lot about how the brain grows, develops, and changes. We’ve discovered that  the first three years of our lives is a critical period in which our brains are growing at an extremely rapid pace. It’s also a time where emotions are our only form of communication.

When we’re infants we don’t have words.  Our main form of communication is through our emotions. We’re happy, we’re sad, we cry. It’s how we let our caregivers know how we’re feeling. We’re also extremely attuned to our caregivers reactions and learn so much about our emotions through our experiences with them.

Many of us grew up with caregivers who themselves weren’t comfortable with the full range of feelings: theirs as well as others. As infants, we pick up on their discomfort, it feels scary to us, and this sense of danger gets associated with our feelings, and, ultimately, wired into our brains.   Remember, our brains are developing at a rapid rate during this time.

The consequence is that, based on the reactions and the experience we have with our caregivers, we end up feeling uncomfortable around certain feelings, feeling fearful of them. That whole experience gets laid down in our neuro-circuitry. It’s wired into our brains. We end up carrying that experience forward into our adulthood.

We also then have all the cultural messages which serve to reinforce those early experiences that we had:

• “You need to be strong.”
• “It’s not okay for women to be angry.”
• “It’s not okay for men to be vulnerable or to show fear.”

We end up responding to our world in a fearful way based on early experiences and cultural reinforcement.

We have a feelings phobia. Think about the other more obvious phobias and how we respond– whether it’s a fear of heights or being in close quarters – we tend to avoid the things that we’re afraid of. As a consequence, we never get the experience to overcome our fears.

Pretend for a moment that you have a fear of walking over bridges. You can think about crossing over that bridge as much as you want, but change doesn’t really happen until you confront your fear and find a way to cross the bridge.  If we can find a way to reduce our anxiety and take the risk to move forward, we can begin to overcome our fear.   The more we’re able to cross the bridge, or confront whatever we’re afraid of, the more our fears melt away.

Change doesn’t always happen merely by trying to think differently.  Due to the way that the brain is wired, our feelings can be much stronger than our thoughts. If you’re wired to feel afraid of something, trying to think your way through it is not as effective. When we have new experiences and we’re able to open up and regulate our anxiety, we begin to change on a physiological level.

Opening up to our feelings and learning how to regulate and tame our anxiety changes us. By taking small steps to open up, we can build the capacity to be with our feelings. It’s like you’re developing a new skill; and just like any other skill, you need to do it, practice it, and work at it in order for you it to develop, become second nature, and to feel good about it.

Try that with one fear that you have this week. Take some small steps to get a new experience around that fear. It will give you the courage to move past obstacles that may have been stopping you for years.

Learn how to live like you mean it, even when times are tough. Reserve your free copy of the 30 minute audio program, Optimal Living in Challenging Times at www.cfcliving.com/optimalliving

Dr. Ron Frederick helps people all over the world to use the wisdom and power of their emotions to get the lives they really want.