Understanding anxiety: a personal perspective

Anxiety is what we feel when we are worried, tense or afraid – particularly about things that are about to happen to us, or which we think could happen in the future. Anxiety is a word we now use commonly in our society, describing a range of fears and worries, including generalised anxiety, health anxiety, separation anxiety, and social anxiety.

In this article, we’ll look at how anxiety can develop, explore it through a personal case study, and consider how counselling can help people better understand and manage it.

How coping behaviours can fuel anxiety

Anxiety usually occurs when we are preoccupied with something in the future, such as a worry that something negative is going to happen to us, or a feeling of uncertainty about a future event, for example.

As anxiety starts, there are various coping mechanisms we might adopt to help us feel safe from the uncertainty. Maybe we thoroughly prepare for something, trying to keep one step ahead. We may repeatedly check every detail about what we are about to do, seek reassurance from something or someone, or we may even try to avoid the situation altogether.

There can be short-term relief from such measures, and we might think we have developed a coping mechanism which keeps us calm, but this can prevent us from learning how to deal with uncertainties and develop more lasting techniques to transform situations. It’s as if we don’t develop, and instead stay stuck in the coping patterns we’ve formed.

A personal case study: my first experience of anxiety

I've had anxiety. Almost 40 years ago (1987), I had a panic attack during an A-level exam.  At school and college, I used to worry about exams, and my coping mechanism would be to work hard and revise well, memorising everything that I'd studied.

This one exam was really important to me, and there was an expectation for me to do well. One of the questions in the exam was slightly difficult, and I started to get overwhelmed and experience some brain fog, not being able to think about what I needed to say in the exam answer.

I hadn't envisaged this question. I was unprepared. My heart started racing, I became dizzy, and I developed a clammy, sweaty body; the whole episode lasted 5-10 minutes. Once I started writing again, my composure came back. I passed the exam, but not at the high grade that was expected of me.

Reflecting back, I think as a child I developed a habit of over-worrying about exams, and I would work hard through revision to make sure I passed exams. Eventually, the buildup of this, with the expectations, was too much. There were other factors, too. Dealing with change and the uncertainty of where I was going to live and work after my exams. I was drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis as a kind of coping mechanism, too, which was my way of numbing the unhappy feelings I was having.

What happened in the exam was a panic attack. Those of you who have had panic attacks will know that they are not very nice. You feel that you are going to die, perhaps of a heart attack or some other form of bodily dysfunction.

There were sexuality and gender identification uncertainties, too, to navigate as a young person. There was not much talk about these issues when I was a teenager and a young adult. I felt I stood out, being quite asexual at the time, not distinguishing much between male friends or female friends, and happy not being in a relationship, whilst friends were all in relationships, some even getting married and having kids.

I would occasionally be ridiculed for my taste in pop music, most of my favourite singers being gay. I felt some social pressures to ‘fit in’, but I didn’t fit in, and I feel this contributed to my anxiety. Nowadays, I can relate to non-binary attitudes to sexuality and gender, and its fluidity for some. We’re all different – and that’s OK.

I grew up in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, where expression of feelings, within my family, at school, with peers and in British culture, was perhaps not encouraged. There was very much a ‘don’t feel’ mentality.

What helped me understand and manage anxiety

After the panic attack, I became socially anxious, at times feeling awkward in social situations where there were loud, happy, outgoing people. Panic attacks almost came back in these situations. A friend noticed and kindly signposted me to some student counselling.

Having a counsellor can help us understand ourselves. The counsellor I had didn't seem to be in any rush for me to solve my problems, wanting me to understand what was going on for me. He was very calm. I felt calm in his presence, and I was able to slow down some of my mental processes and understand my anxiety. He was helping me slow down.

What was happening for me during the time of this exam and panic attack was that I had been revising too much (working hard) and not expressing my feelings, whether they be joyful or painful feelings. This, I believe, created a deadlock in my mind, which contributed to the anxiety. If I could keep my feelings at bay by working hard, then this would keep me safe. This was my coping strategy.

I felt much better after the counselling, and made sure I started to have a good time in my life. A few years later, I went travelling for 18 months and discovered mindfulness of breathing meditation on a Buddhist retreat in Thailand. I came to realise that there is a direct correlation between your breath and your state of mind.

When we are anxious, we often breathe shallow breaths, but if we can learn to breathe really deeply, to the depths of our diaphragm (bottom of our lungs), this will calm our mind.

If you have counselling for anxiety, early on in the counselling, the counsellor may introduce some exercises to help you identify and reduce your anxiety, such as identifying where in your body you feel anxious, and perhaps they may introduce some breathing exercises.

How counselling can help you understand anxiety

Identifying your anxiety and learning how to reduce it through relaxation techniques are often in the early stages of counselling. The main thing in counselling, long term, is to try to understand what is underlying the anxiety, and creating it.

The anxiety I experienced wasn't really to do with the exams I had. There was something underlying the anxiety, my repressed feelings towards others, that I was unaware of. My counsellor's calm and slow approach gave me the opportunity to slow down my mental processes, reflect, and understand more clearly what was going on for me. He would occasionally ask me how I felt, what I would like to experience in my life, and what I would find fulfilling.

My anxiety issues were more to do with my being unaware of my feelings. At the time, I was very much in my own world a lot and unaware of my feelings and social needs. The counsellor helped me become more aware of this. It slowly dawned on me what underlying feelings were creating the anxiety.

I was able to explore the deadlock in my mind that I mentioned earlier, and how working too hard was repressing my feelings. With longer-term counselling, it may even be possible to understand feelings that have been passed down to us from previous generations, for us to understand our conditioning, the way we have been, and try to construct a new and healthier way of thinking and feeling.

I would say that the main thing I have learnt through my training and therapy is an increased self-awareness of my feelings, and I have learnt how to stay in the here and now – not to worry about the future, or dwell on the past. To be present.

Being kind to yourself (lessening critical self-talk) is important too, and learning ways to relax and make time to enjoy yourself.

If this resonates with you, it may help to speak with a trained counsellor. Therapy can offer a safe space to explore what might be underlying your anxiety and find ways to manage it more effectively.