Quirkybrain| [Long read, adapted from a newsletter] A lesser known approach to supporting yourself for anxiety This week’s post is about anxiety and finding ways of coping with it and managing it that are appropriate for you. For this piece, I’ll take you through what anxiety is, my story regarding anxiety, and when anxiety is a help and when it’s a hindrance. I’ll also share with you some thoughts relating to having a different experience of anxiety that have helped me as an AuDHD person in case they are help-FULL and hope-FULL for you in some way. I’m doing this because of the impact that anxiety had on my life at one time. What I’ve learned through research and self-coaching helped me to reduce its frequency and severity, and I’d like to hope that something I’ve learned from can be useful to you folks in some way. |
| Let’s start off with what anxiety is and how it showed up in my life… |
| The NHS website defines anxiety as “a feeling of unease, such as worry or fear, that can be mild or severe”. According the World Health Organisation, people experiencing anxiety often report the following: feeling tense, difficulty concentrating, nausea/digestive issues, heart rate problems, trembling or sweating, poor sleep, and a sense of panic or “impending doom”. Back in 2014, 6 years before I was diagnosed as autistic and 7 years before I was diagnosed as ADHD, I was diagnosed with Generalised Anxiety Disorder. I was experiencing a lot of worry around, well, everything. I was worried about money, my studies, my new relationship, my living situation – everything. One day, I worried so much that (as I describe it) my mind “went pop” and I seemed to dissociate. My then partner and flatmate found be wandering down a nearby main road in the night with one shoe and one sock missing. I have no memory of this at all. I must have blocked it out. The next day, I was “strongly encouraged” to attend the doctor. I did. I was told that I had Generalised Anxiety Disorder, given tablets, and told to attend a mindfulness group and, when I did, we ate a chocolate-covered raisin and tried to focus on what it felt and tasted like in our mouths. The tablets helped a little. The raisin, unsurprisingly, did not. I never went back to the mindfulness group. Over the next 5 years, I went back to the doctors again and again about anxiety, and sometimes about very low mood, and was simply told “you have anxiety and depression”. But that didn’t sit right with me. I felt that I was experiencing the signs of anxiety and depression, but that I didn’t “have” these as conditions that would always be with me. I felt there must be some reason why I kept experiencing these mental health difficulties. It made no sense. Sure, there were legitimate concerns that I had which could provoke mental health consequences from time-to-time but none of them were the “classic” triggers such as bereavement, a big traumatic incident, or day-to-day precarity in living. At no point did any GP or mental health professional sit down with me and say: “Becci, let’s run through some domains of your life and try to see what is going on here. Let’s try and work out WHY this is happening for you, and what that might be telling us.” Of course, what it was “telling us” was that I was AuDHD, and my anxiety and emotional responses to things were, actually, unfortunate but natural consequences of extensive masking, not understanding my brain, and, therefore, not being able to craft and live a life that benefitted me. An autistic person I met this week asked me: do you think you were misdiagnosed and how did that affect you? I do think I was misdiagnosed, in a way. We know from lived experience accounts and research that many women without intellectual disabilities contact health services multiple times over several years due to mental health and are told they “simply have anxiety and depression”. Instead, in an ideal world, we would be gently pointed towards the possibility of neurodivergence whilst being supported to manage those thoughts and feelings in a neuro-friendly way for the day-to-day. Instead, in my case, I feel that my diagnoses came about years later than they could have, and they came under my own steam because I knew something “wasn’t right” for me. That being said, I cannot and would not change how my story has unfolded. I suffered at times during that period but my path allowed me to experience and understand so much that not only helps me to keep myself in a better state now, but which I can use to help others. I am, in retrospect, grateful for much of how things played out for me, even though it felt horrid at times. (Below, you can see some signs that you might be experiencing anxiety but, if you’re not sure and not sure about the frequency and intensity of what you’re experiencing, I would recommend talking to a neuro-affirming GP and/or therapist, if you can and want to.) |
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| I think it’s worth me writing a little bit about what anxiety is FOR, in my view. You see, things like anxiety responses do exist for a reason and, since humans didn’t evolve to NOT have the capacity for anxiety, there must be some “benefit” to having it as an emotional response within the species. I’ve previously written in newsletters about certain emotions being messengers. Emotions exist to flag things to our attention so that we avoid or change things that aren’t good for us, and to help us gravitate towards or create more of things that feel great. A lot of what goes on in the human brain and body is RESPONSIVE and is about maintaining harmony and balance in the moment. That is to say, you need water, so the brain sends you a signal about this, and – if all goes well – you’ll responsively balance your systems by drinking what you need. However, this is mostly for stuff relating to keeping your physical body watered, fed and upright. When it comes to responding to threats and avoiding danger, our systems are PREDICTIVE rather than responsive. What’s going to keep your species alive better on balance? A group of people who approach some unknown animals and RESPOND to working out they’re lions a bit too late, or a group of people who can predict that those animals *might* be lions, and they should start moving away now, just in case? You’ve guessed it…the second group. In evolutionary terms, it’s overall most efficient and effective to over-predict danger and get it mostly right because you lose relatively little if you’re wrong – and keep your life! However, if you were to miss or underpredict danger, you’ve got a higher chance of not making it back from the plains for some berries. Therefore, it could be that anxiety evolved as a kind of predictive signal to help you investigate whether or not there’s something to avoid or urgently change, and our brains might be weighted to err on the side of caution as a result. We can see, then, why it can be beneficial to be predictive rather than responsive when it comes to dangerous or stressful situations. However, if that anxiety message is coming through too often and too intensely, that is not helpful. It’s a hindrance rather than a help. A simple WhatsApp message from a friend asking you why you’re late can spiral you as if you were predictively preparing to flee from a lion on the plains. As I have said about other emotional responses or difficulties, we probably don’t actually want to get rid of anxiety altogether. If I’m in a situation and someone does not have good intentions towards me, I’d very much like to feel anxious for a few minutes so that I get a clue that there’s something important to pay attention to and avoid or fix. A certain amount of occasional situational anxiety can be useful. What I don’t want is for that predictive response filled with all those consequences listed above to be happening several times a day, 365 days a year. |
| So what do we do about it? |
| In my coaching practice, I work with something called the “neck up, neck down” approach to anxiety management. Neck up anxiety management is about using your mind, brain, reflections, words and logic to try and calm or get yourself out of the anxiety. It’s rational and strategic. Neck down strategies for anxiety are about using the body, nervous system and sensory systems to calm, sooth, reassure and resource yourself so that you can feel calmer and better equipped to deal with things in life. Have a guess which one I used to do most naturally? And what do you think, on average, most of the ADHD/autistic people I work with tend to naturally gravitate most towards? Neck up strategies. Many of us seem to be naturally better at or naturally more open to trying things like: – problem-solving self-talk (e.g., “you can do this” or “don’t worry, it will be ok”) – planning/listing possibilities/solutions/reasons – talking to others or talking aloud to self/pets/plushies – building up mental pictures or conversational maps about situation – seeing what will play out, how and why in an unfolding situation – researching what is happening or what you’re feeling from a scientific or practical perspective These are great skills to have natural ability in or tendencies towards, even if you want to further improve them. They definitely have a role to play in your anxiety management toolkit. However, these strategies, in my opinion, make for only half a toolkit. Plus, if overused, they can hinder rather than help. Too frequent and too intensive neck-up strategies can actually turn into rumination, which may lead to further worry and anxiety. Neck up strategies are what I used to pretty much exclusively gravitate towards, but I have since re-kitted out my toolkit to deliberately include neck down strategies, and the reason why is a positive incident that I experienced before I even knew I was autistic and ADHD… |
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| Up until the pandemic, I used to attend a local “depression and anxiety” group run by the fantastic charity Healthy Minds. As well as running the weekly group (which I credit with saving my sanity), Healthy Minds offered one off workshops for people to learn about ways to look after their mental well-being. One week, I was at a loose end as I was off work due to what I know now was autistic burnout. I had the chance to go to a breathwork workshop, and so I took it. It is no exaggeration to say that, on that day, I learned for the first time (only in my mid-30s!) to BELLY BREATHE. For the first time, I experienced how my body, nervous system and mind would feel IF I just breathed deeply and with intention for a couple of minutes. My body relaxed. My mind cleared a little. I seemed to feel bigger – not just taller in some way, but just more expansive, like the map of my body had more space in it somehow. I felt much CALMER. And all I had done was follow someone telling me to breathe in and breathe out for a few minutes, showing me how to breathe with my abdomen, rather than my chest. Even though it would still be several years before I received (or started to write?) the user manual to my brain, I walked away with a neck-down strategy that has literally and metaphorically saved my life more than once since that day. As I continued to learn about myself and train as a positive psychology coach, I was able to research the literature on different neck-down ways that ADHD/autistic people might be able to soothe their nervous systems and keep themselves calmer. You see, sometimes anxiety-provoking things happen and, sadly but understandably, these things may be something you can do little to nothing about. Especially for those events (like a job loss due to economic factors or a divorce that you didn’t instigate), it can be vital to have a set of tried-and-tested personal neck-down strategies to help you get through as best you can. Why? Well, of course it might help you to soothe and care for yourself but…neck up strategies often can’t or don’t work in those low-influence situations. If you lose your job and it’s not your fault, there’s no point sometimes listing out all the factors that led to it or ruminating on what might happen next when you don’t have the information you need yet for that to be a fruitful approach. What you actually may need in such situations are ways to soothe yourself, calm yourself, show love and compassion to yourself, and settle and resource your nervous system to feel that bit more like you might just be able to cope with the path ahead. Whatever it may turn out to be. In a second, I’ll list out a whole bunch of potential neck down strategies that you can learn about/try out solo, or which you can skill up on and practice with a coach like me. There is a caveat for psychological safety and efficacy reasons, though. It’s vital that you pick neck down strategies that you can do, want to do, are safe to do, and which are accessible or adjustable for your needs and circumstances. I would not suggest in coaching that someone who has experienced a recent trauma go off and start doing loads of breathwork, as some people find that they don’t feel safe doing it, or can end up feeling more anxious. Therefore, should you have any history of trauma or active trauma at the moment, I would seek out conversations with professionals who are neurodivergent and trauma-informed to see what strategies you could learn about that would work for you. You might be fine with breathwork, but it would be good, if available to you, to have the right breathwork practitioner around you when you try it for the first time or two. It’s also important that what you go for is enjoyable, doable and self-chosen because, if not, you might forget to do those practices, be unmotivated to do them, or find them too hard to get started with for some reason – especially if you aren’t able to see the value you’ll get yet. I really recommend picking what YOU think will work for you because, otherwise, it could trigger demand avoidance if, like me, you tend more towards saying no to even useful suggestions when you are highly anxious. |
| With those caveats in mind, I can set out below a list of things you might choose from IF you need some ideas to experiment with. Here are my neck down strategies that I draw on… |
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| My own favourite regular strategies – meditation, breathwork, yoga and walking – all happen most days of the week, with meditation and breathwork happening largely daily for long periods. I am on day 90 of a meditation streak right now, and I’m having way fewer meltdowns as a result. I am so much calmer and settled thanks to these neck-down strategies, and I have not had an episode of “depression” for a couple of years now. There are times where I even experience no anxiety at all for days or weeks, and there are times where I do still feel anxious, but these seem more like typical responses to something that is genuinely stressful. For the most part, however, I would say my anxiety is nowhere near what it was because of the self-regulating and nervous-system supporting practices (not perfects!) that I have gently cultivated over the last few years. However, I now have the techniques above to then help me calm myself so I can then use my neck-up strategies mindfully and effectively to get myself practically into a different situation or outcome when that feels appropriate. As many of you will know, I work with a lot of my clients on anxiety and emotional regulation, helping them to discover what type of strategies they want and facilitating them to have the skill and confidence to deploy them regularly. If this is something you’d like to learn about and draw on my knowledge about in coaching, get in touch for a thorough and collaborative consult. In any case, I hope that this post has helped you to think about other ways of regulating yourself and supporting yourself with anxiety, giving you some inspiration about what may help you, if it feels good and doable for you. All best wishes and take care – Becci. |
