Fight or Flight

Anxiety is actually one of our bodies’ natural responses to stressful situations, and can be a very healthy one. Anxiety is part of the way we recognize and avoid dangerous situations. The trouble is that the mental (and often unconscious) systems that watch for and respond to danger evolved for much more primal situations than we normally face. They don’t necessarily make a distinction between degrees of danger; they might throw us into ‘red alert’ mode for any and every anxious situation they identify, from the bear in the woods to the creepy stranger following you after dark, to pandemic news updates, to the growing awareness of the climate crisis.

For a long time, I tried to use my anxiety like a superpower. I would get surges of anxiety, when my heart would race, and I’d find it hard to focus, but I could never tell why. Now I refer to those episodes as ‘visits from the anxiety fairy’. They might happen at random, sometimes on a daily basis: an unseen fairy dropping off a little package of nervous disruption to unsettle my day. I used to ask myself ‘What am I forgetting?’ as if this was my subconscious screaming for my attention to one of a thousand projects and tasks simmering on the back burner of my mind’s stove. I kept detailed lists of all the things that I might forget, so that at the next surge of anxiety, I could quickly scan through them to reassure myself that there was nothing about to burst into flame, or at least leap towards something I’d been neglecting for too long. For me, these visits from the anxiety fairy were a push to be extremely organized and focused on productivity.

For me, this turned into a pretty toxic impulse...

This post originally appeared in the October 2022 issue of Anglican Life.

Click here to read the whole article.