An Excerpt from “How to Procrastinate” (Use Link to Access)
Moving in and out of it
I have lived most of my life in a perpetual state of anxiety. As a result, it is hardwired into my personality. However, it is not inherent. I don’t believe for a second that it is genetically predisposed. Things still occur which can easily trigger me into an anxious state. Thankfully, I have cultivated the capacity to know when I am anxious and when I am not. Its so obvious now, it is like night and day. However, it wasn’t always like this. I was so unaware of my emotional state of being that sometimes I didn’t know what I was feeling. The emotion was so foreign to me that I didn’t know what to do with the signal!
This is an important point to make because anxiety can never be addressed directly. Anyone that has ever had to address anxiety, will tell you that any attempts to get rid of anxiety will actually make you more anxious. More is elaborated below.
The Nature of anxiety
Anxiety is a physiological response to a challenge. Its good for you. It is your body preparing you for a fight by ramping up your heart rate, breathing, reducing attention down to a smaller point, and changing all other sorts of physiological things. It is for your benefit.
Anything can be a challenge. When I say anything I mean anything! What happens when you make anxiety itself a challenge? You will get more anxious! When you start to hate anxiety, and you try make it go away, it becames the challenge. If you make an effort to reduce your anxiety, then anxiety becomes the challenge. The body creates more anxiety in effort to help you fight off the anxiety! That’s why it will never work. That’s why people get stuck in anxiety loops which linger with them for years! They think, “Oh no! I’m anxious again! Why!?” and then increase their anxiety.
With the ability to make anxiety a challenge, you can correctly extrapolate that you can make any other emotion a challenge. That’s exactly what we do and that’s exactly why we get anxious when we work with negative emotions. When we’re not allowed to feel angry at our annoying manager, then anger becomes the challenge. When we’re not allowed to cry because we are men, then sadness becomes a challenge. Social anxiety is often the result of a feeling not being allowed to be there in a group setting. How often are you repressing your most natural state of being? All of those times you are actually creating anxiety for yourself. Whatever it is that you are repressing, that emotion or content becomes the challenge since you wish for it to not be there, and you fight for it to go away.
Why do we not wish for it to be there? Most likely its because we are protecting the status quo or we are people pleasing, or we are holding space, or we were taught that those emotions were not safe. For example, I was taught that anger is not safe when I was very little. My parents taught it me when they punished me for being too loud. Unfortunately, I become loud when I was angry. If you look real closely, you will see that any reason you come up with to suppress yourself, will be for the sake of something or someone outside of you. This is called an introject. It is an attitude that you’ve inherited at some point in your life about said emotion or content. On the other hand, the body doesn’t judge itself for its own emotion. Instead, what happens is that we internalize belief systems, they become the set of rules for which we are allowed to operate on, and then when we fall outside of these rules, we beging to judge ourselves. Its all rather subconcious and innocent.
Another way of saying the same thing is that whatever judgement you’ve made on someone else for being a particular way will come back and bite you in the ass. That’s because since you’ve judged that other person, you’ll try to not be like them. You will believe that someone else is going to judge you the same way. We don’t really face physical threats on a regular basis anymore, so anxiety is mostly a fear of our emotions and the judgement of those emotions from others. When they inevitably come up, you will get anxious if you have come to believe that it isn’t allowed.
Reducing anxiety
To ward off anxiety, you have to confront that which you are afraid of, and re-teach your body that those things are not to be afraid of.
In the case of emotion, which is the case for most people, you have to feel out those emotions which are being suppressed. Then, you have to challenge your beliefs about those emotions such that they stop being suppressed, and are allowed to be expressed fully. All of your negative emotions have every right to exist and be expressed just as much as all of the positive emotions. If there is even a tiny amount of suppressing happening, it will never be fully expressed, and anxiety will never truly go away.
If you have the thought, “I’m going to be angry so that I can be at peace with myself” then you will not completely integrate anger and you will still be anxious about it.
If, on the other hand, you have the thought, “I am going to be angry now and if I need to be angry for the rest of my life then so be it”, only then will you actually integrate the anger fully.
Love yourself
The difference between the two thought processes above is that in the former you are creating conditions for yourself again. You’re not letting yourself be natural. In the latter thought, you are loving yourself. What is unconditional love, after all, than letting the recipient of your love be there unconditionally.
Let your emotions come unconditionally, and in doing so you will start loving yourself. Your body-organism will start to be more natural.
Effortless Action
We are so used to being driven from a place of anxiety or fear, that we’ve forgotten what its like to be live from a place of love and joy.
As you progress through your reflections and as you taper off anxiety, you will notice that you will have a pile of todo lists in front of you, and yet your physical body will feel as though there is nothing to do. This is the opposite of what you might be used to, which is that you’ve had a list of things to do, and you were constantly worried and anxious to see if you were ever going to get them done, that you’ve felt slight overwhelm.
It is indeed possible to have many ambitions, and yet none of those ambitions carry any emotional charge. We might believe that those things won’t get done since they don’t energize us emotionally, but that is untrue. You will see for yourself, that since there is no energetic, emotional resistance to a task, that getting started on a task is significantly easier. There is no procrastination whatsoever, there’s no “what If” thoughts. You simply start, you do the work, and then you finish. You will discover within your body that you are slightly agitated from doing the task for so long. At other times you’ll enter flow with ease, and 3 or 4 hours will go by in an instant.
Slow the F@#$ down
Life is full of challenges. It will always be full of challenges. Every challenge will bring in anxiety. What happens when the challenges pile up and the cluster together in a small amount of time? Of course you’ll feel anxious! Its inevitable. Thats what happens when you live in an accelerated state. Basically, you’ll have more challenges piled together closer in time, therefor you’ll have a lot of little anxieties piling into a giant clump of a very noticable and overwhelming state of anxiety.
I guarantee, assuming you’re not scared of feeling emotions, that the moment you remove the pressure to get things done, and then also slow down a bit, that anxiety will automatically start to alleviate itself. If you were chronically anxious, it might take some time. Perhaps several months. So long as you are feeling anxious, however, remind yourself that you need to slow down. Take it easy. We are meant to enjoy life, not work all of our lives. We are designed to be radiant, confident and full of joy!
Slowing down ≠ Move fast
Slowing down doesn’t equal move slowly. It means, don’t put so many challenges ahead of you in the span of a short time. That’s really all it comes down to it.
However, you can move your physical body as fast as you want. Go for a run! Go for a hike. Enjoy speed. However, don’t tackle challenge after challenge in span of a short period of time. You’ll notice when you do this, your body automatically moves fast because it thinks there is not enough time to get things done. So, it will try to get things done quickly in an effort to get to the next task. This will generate too much anxiety.
Enjoy where you are at right now, regardless if it is fast or slow.
Like Night and Day
To be free of anxiety, you should look at it in the face. Not with any intention to get rid of it, but simply to know it. If you keep attuning to your body, you should eventually understand, like night and day, what state you are in.
If you can understand what state you are in, then you know what actions to take to come out of it. For example, I can always guarantee that I will be in a perpetual state of anxiety on my fourth day of the week during the work week. That’s just the nature of being employed where I work. During the next day, I do nothing but relax, spend time at my spot, eat tons, workout, then sleep. No errands, no catching-up. I’m simply enjoying where I am. Sometimes two days are needed and sometimes three days. I don’t go back to work unless I am fresh.
What’s fresh? Every action taken across my day accompanies a feeling of relaxedness, lightness and pressure free. Nothing is done for the sake of a result. I make tea very slowly, and I drink it peacefully. I cook as though I have unlimited time. I clean as though I have unlimited time. There is no nagging pressure to be anywhere else but right here in the moment. Every single activity fills me with joy. Even washing dishes. Even cleaning my room. If there is even a slight feeling of hurriedness or uncomfortable ness -which usually accompanies the thought: “I need to hurry this so that I can go somewhere or do something,” I know that to be the onset of anxiety. That’s when I attune to my body and I ask, “What’s it like to be me right now?” or “honey, are you ok? What do you need?” Underneath that unpleasant feeling, there is a hidden emotional trigger that needs to be integrated.
All tasks are Neutral
Every task (anything) is inherently neutral! The only reason we hate our chores is because of underlying fearful beliefs that are being triggered by that activity. For example, I used to hate doing dishes. However, I realized I only hated it because I believed that if I did them I was going to miss out. “Miss out on what!?” I wondered. When I was kid, I loved to play video games, except my parents would interrupt my gaming sessions and force me to wash dishes. Now, I haven’t played video games in years, but somehow my body still held on to that childhood fear. Once I felt out that emotion, and integrated the experience, I no longer loathed washing dishes.
Again, its about recognizing unintegrated, stored emotional content within the body. If you keep feeling out everything, there will be nothing to be anxious about. You walk will around radiant, light and confident.
An Excerpt from:
