Existential Fears
I wrote this post quite a while back, and now have held onto it beyond the month it was originally intended to run. Perhaps that is related to the subject matter itself and I had an existential fear about the topic. But I’ve conquered whatever made me put it on hold, so here it.
The month of July has not been a favorite since I was a teenager. My grandfather died in 1997 a month before I turned 18. And five years later, my sisters and I received a devastating call from our mother that my father had died at 62, for reasons still unknown.
My grandfather’s death set off an existential crisis; over the next few years in college, I struggled in fear of death and the unknown. The loss of my father amplified that crisis for the sheer absurdity of the timing—he had shed his grueling life as a dry cleaner for a dream job as manager of a halfway house and was in the best physical shape of his life.
Ruminating in bed became a way of life for me, hours of sleep simply gone.
***
Over the past six-plus years as a clinical mental health counselor, I’ve had the fortune to learn about anxiety and the mind-body connection.
When I look back, I realize the knowledge I’ve gained in my three careers (journalism, marketing and communications, counseling) and constantly share with my clients today is, practically speaking, part of the same instinctive ways I came to soothe my own existential crisis so many years ago.
Todd Kashday, a psychologist and professor at George Mason University who researches how and why anxiety can become dominant, is credited with a quote often used in therapy: “The antidote to anxiety is curiosity.”
So what does curiosity look like in a constructive way to ease anxiety? Simply put, it is making use of your creative brain. That can be done in so many ways:
Journaling
Social time and conversation with friends
Playing or listening to music
Art
Physical activity
Reading or watching television or films, especially ones that tell a good story
All of these activate the prefrontal cortex, the personality center of the brain, rather than the amygdala, the instinctive part of the brain where the powerful emotions from the brain’s limbic system such as fear and anxiety are transformed into the only responses the amygdala knows: fight, flight, freeze or fawn.
When we stay in our prefrontal cortex, our thinking brain, we function at a higher level, with the ability to separate emotions from actions.
As for me, the creative brain was key to getting through my existential crisis, though I had no idea at the time. When I lay in bed at night, rather than dwell on the fear of the unknown, I began to create fictional characters and would conjure stories about them. One of those characters later would become the protagonist of two novels I’ve written.
It's not easy moving from the instinctive, primal emotions in the amygdala to your prefrontal cortex. But there are many ways to soothe the instinctive and reintroduce the prefrontal.
A key step is to regulate your breathing and make sure you exhale as much as you inhale; the amygdala thrives on oxygen, which it uses to create adrenaline and then cortisol. If you regulate your breathing, it will keep the amygdala from being flooded with oxygen. A change of scenery, some music, taking a walk—all can help you move away from the amygdala.
Although my mind still occasionally goes to places of fear or anxiety, I know that thanks to my creative brain, I have the tools to reverse court.