ANXIETY – LET US UNDERSTAND IT

 

If of late you are feeling nervous, anxious or on edge, not being able to stop or control worrying, trouble relaxing, feeling something awful might happen, you are not alone. Anxiety is core to our survival as it underpins our fight or flight response, helping us escapes danger, but when it causes prolonged fear, suffering or avoidance, it becomes a problem in people’s lives. Can we stand up to that force in our mind that is hijacking the amygdala in our brain, which is programmed to take us to fight or flight?

Performance anxiety is reflective of two different kinds of fear: Fear of failure – “of not being good enough” – and fear of being judged in a negative way. Even the top athletes and sportspersons have shown these signs and some of them did not bother to hide them from the world! By coming out in the open they have done yeomen service to millions of others who were hiding their state of mental health as if it was a stigma and were suffering in isolation.

Society perceives elite athletes as "superhuman beings" with unfathomable willpower, speed, strength, skills and abilities that mere mortals can only aspire to. Even the word Olympian with its roots in the Greek mythology, implies that these athletes are superhuman beings. However, in recent years, mental health disorders and mental health symptoms in elite athletes have been receiving increased attention.

Elite athletes are expected to be "focused', "resilient," "confident" and "composed." The assumption is also that only the mentally and emotionally strong athletes will succeed and be able to compete at the highest level. But the reality is that elite athletes are also vulnerable to and struggle with mental health problems such as anxiety, depression, eating disorders, obsessive compulsive disorders, addictions and substance misuse. Quite a few sportspersons, exponents of different sporting disciplines have gone public with their mental health issues, frankly admitting that it is affecting their performance in sports and worse still, their way of life.  Michael Phelps (Olympic swimmer), Marcus Trescothick, Ben Stokes, Glen Maxwell, Jonathan Trott, Sarah Taylor and Will Pucovski (international cricketers), Victoria Pendleton (Olympic cyclist), Johnny Wilkinson (international rugby player), to mention just a few have all taken a break from their sports to address their mental health issues. Add to this list now Simone Biles (Olympic Gymnastics) and Nayomi Osaka (International Tennis) who too have admitted that they need to sort out the demon in their minds before going on with their sports. Balancing the pressure to succeed does not come easy, many of the athletes have felt the need to prioritize their health while elevating conversations surrounding mental health to a whole new level.

 

The COVID stress

Many people are reporting moderate to severe mental distress during COVID restrictions. They have experienced high or very high levels of psychological distress in the previous year and a half. Anxiety had become a buzzword everywhere from workplaces to e-classrooms, Twitter to TikTok, and WhatsApp to Telegram. Though common people have their own understanding of this term, and often use it loosely to describe a feelings of being on edge, nervous, scared, fearful, worried or stressed, none of them are wrong. They are perhaps experiencing something very similar but expressing differently and are actually implying that they have ‘a fear of the unknown.’

In a time like this, it can be really difficult to remain optimistic and think positively about the future when we are surrounded by negativity and when our recent past has been quite depressing. But mental health experts recommend using a unique tool that can transform the way you look at your life – setting “intentions”. This is a much gentler way of dealing with anxities in times of crisis. Instead of setting hard and fast goals that are either achieved or broken, you will be setting extensive ideas with intentions that help you make changes in your life in a gentler, more compassionate way. The basic idea is that with intentions, instead of being focused on a specific outcome, your purpose will be more on the journey. It's a commitment to what you want the journey to be about as life itself is a journey and not a destination. As a result, you will be more inspired to take action, as opposed to pressuring yourself to do so and getting anxious thereby.

 

Good anxiety and bad anxiety.

You will be surprised to know that this anxiety in its benign form has a useful role to play in our life. It alerts us to the need for more resources: there’s something going on here, we need to attend to it, to solve the problem or find a way to avoid it.  It offers us this fight or flight instinct. Was Capt. Chesley Sullenberger not anxious before landing the U.S Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River on the fateful winter afternoon of January 15, 2009, thus saving the lives of 150 people on board? Are the cardiac surgeons not anxious every time their patient goes on bypass?

So anxiety is not always bad. Your brain is constantly creating predictions about your environment so it can stay a few milliseconds ahead that could make the difference in a high-threat situation. It is taking everything from past experiences and guessing what’s going to happen next and those guesses are important for our life saving decisions. When performing complex tasks under pressure, like writing an exam or landing a plane, or performing a life saving surgery you need to focus your attention on threats, and here some amount of anxiety improves your performance. This is normal anxiety.

However, if this is a constant day and night feeling overpowering our thought process it becomes extremely unpleasant with fearfulness, recurrent panic attacks and/or constant worry. Worry is an attempt to try and control things, get the measure of things and get some certainty and be prepared. It arises as a coping mechanism, allowing us to anticipate everything that could go wrong and to plan for any eventuality, which may feel like it is “inoculating” us from the worst. But unfortunately this ‘worry’ is a very inefficient problem-solving strategy. It feels as if it is helping, whilst at the same time triggering anxiety. Worry can start to become a burden in itself because it’s just miserable to be worried all the time. Then again, many people can “start worrying about being worried”, which can quickly turn into a kind of psychological loop.

Normal anxiety becomes abnormal when you find yourself anxious about not real stimuli but fictitious ones. You feel threat when there are actually none. Off course, the pandemic is not a figment of our imaginations.  But what has actually happened is that it has got some of us up and ready to solve a problem that’s really out of our hands. Their brain would prefer to have a bunch of resources in their hand to deal with the unknown source of scare, but they can’t because the adversary is unknown. That mix of unpredictability and not having the resources to cope is a perfect cocktail for the brain to churn out anxiety. These people become hyper-vigilant and are constantly looking for signs of danger.

 

Not just the mind

This hyper-vigilant status is causing excessive production of hormones such as adrenalin and the stress hormone cortisol. Their heart rate goes up. They breathe faster, and might even become dizzy or nauseous. They sweat, their muscles tense (and teeth clench, shoulders creep up to our ears, and so on). Some people mistake these changes as serious illness – in turn feeding their anxiety. The anxious brain can distort our ability to appraise things efficiently. Prolonged production of cortisol can cause health issues such as the propensity to gain weight, which carries an elevated risk of diabetes and depression. It can affect appetite, sleep and ability to concentrate and function properly in daily life.

So yes, anxiety is a real issue, but not all anxieties are bad. And when they are we should be open about our mental health issues, seek professional help, as our sports icons are openly doing, and kill the demon before it can do any further harm to us. Sportspersons like Ben Stokes, Simone Biles and Nayomi Osaka deserve our respect and admiration for talking openly and declaring to the world ‘It is OK not to be OK!’ Bravo!!