The Anxiety Cycle: Triggered … AND TRICKED!
The anxiety cycle starts as a seemingly never ending loop where you get triggered, you fight through it, you calm down, then you worry and fret over the next time you might get triggered. It can become an exhausting merry-go-ground if you’re new to this process and convinced that high anxiety and panic are horrible disasters that must be avoided or “managed” at all costs. But this is not the whole story of the anxiety cycle. We must go beyond the trigger to see the trick!
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You Can See (And Feel) The Trigger …
Everyone starts this journey by seeing themselves as being stuck in a never ending cycle of triggers, calming down, then worry about the next trigger moment. This is how we start. We becoming keenly aware of our triggers, we fight through them to get back to that “safe” feeling, then we wring our hands and worry about how to avoid the next trigger.
This cycle can feel like it never ends. Its exhausting. Its disheartening. And often no matter how hard we try, we cannot find ways to prevent the next go around and stop those triggers.
But Can You See (And Use) The Trick?
At some point, over time, we begin to see that not only are we being triggered into an anxious state, but that we are probably being tricked by that state. We see that every time we get triggered, we ultimately wind up OK. We start to consider that maybe the disaster may not really be real. At some point we start to feel like anxiety is fooling us again and again.
Especially when we become more well informed about the nature of disordered anxiety and see how others are moving forward in recovery, we our logical brains begin to see the cycle not only as being triggered again and again, but being tricked again and again.
This can be a turning point.
When you can nail a “tricked” point to the circle, that can become the point at which you start to peel off the circle on a tangent toward recovery. Noticing and understanding that anxiety is tricking you into behaving as if you are in danger creates a fork in an otherwise endless circular road. It gives you a point at which you can choose a new path and ultimately break the cycle that has trapped you up to this point.
This new path is the path of different responses, dropping escape, avoidance, and safety rituals. This is the path of being afraid, but acting anyway. This path allows us to stop trying so hard to manage and prevent our triggers as we learn that we don’t have to treat them like nightmares any longer. When you start to see that the anxiety cycle includes trickery, that can be the hold you need to swing hard left and jump off the hamster wheel.
Is seeing the trickery of anxiety the fix? Does that make it end? Sadly and as usual .. no. It only it were that easy. There is still hard work to do. Old habits to break. New more adaptive habits to create and practice. New neural pathways to wire. But once we see the trick as being just as important as the trigger, we have a way out.
Will you take that way out?
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Podcast Intro/Outro Music: "Afterglow" by Ben Drake (With Permission)
