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The climate is warming. New diseases are brewing. And, for many, there are serious concerns closer to home: financial worries, loneliness, or illness — our own, or a loved one’s.
Maybe everything will be okay, and, as a friend of mine says, the world is like a giant boat that course-corrects over time.
But the fact is, we don’t know how anything is going to turn out. So how are we to deal with unpredictability that threatens our physical and emotional well-being?
Do we tell ourselves everything is fine and hope that if we repeat it long enough, it will be? Or do we refuse to indulge this kind of false positivity and set to work making the best of what's real?
In the last few years, I lost a beloved dog, was laid off from my job, and my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's. It took years to finally feel like myself again. I reached out to a trauma therapist, Christine Gibson, author of the book The Modern Trauma Toolkit: Nurture Your Post-Traumatic Growth with Personalized Solutions, for strategies on how to deal with loss and anxiety.
Here are her suggestions for those of us who are saddled with the inevitable stressors that come with aging:
Determine if the problem is inside you or outside you.
A frightening medical diagnosis, accident or anxiety or depression can feel overwhelming because they are inside us — literally of our body — and we can't run away from it. Likewise, environmental threats, a layoff, or a stock market plunge can feel overwhelming, as we have no control over them.
Whether the threat is from within or without, our physical response is the same: the amygdala, a small, almond-shaped organ in the temporal lobe of our brain, activates, initiating one of three responses: freeze, fight, or flee. Chronic fear or anxiety, such as living in highly stressful environments, keeps the amygdala engaged, leaving us in a chronically heightened state of defensiveness, which itself can lead to more stress.
And as we already know, stress can impact the body negatively, interfering with sleep, appetite, and eventually, our mood. At prolonged levels, stress can be the catalyst for killer diseases such as stroke and coronary heart disease.
Citing this overload, therapist Gibson notes that we need to be intentional about the health of our inner world, as she puts it: "... our internal environment is one where we have more control."
Choose what you will respond to.
While certain circumstances are painful, sad, and out of our control, allowing our emotions to overwhelm us can inhibit our ability to respond proactively. Therefore, it’s important to choose what we will respond to and how.
Gibson says our emotions express what we are feeling in our bodies. Creating what she calls a “volume dial” — a way to interrupt and turn down the cycle of anxiety — helps us tamp down the full force of our emotions.
There are many ways to do this: Biofeedback (learning to consciously slow your own heart rate), meditation, deep breathing, and aroma therapy reduce the anxiety hormone cortisol. Hugging and massage are calming for many, but you can also soothe: placing your hand on your heart, face, or abdomen can increase your body’s secretion of the naturally occurring neuropeptide oxytocin.
Acupuncture and CBD oils may also be helpful. Regular exercise, staying hydrated, eating healthy meals, and getting enough sleep are all important to keeping the cycle of anxiety at bay.
Find glimmers, not triggers.
When we are already anxious, everything can become a trigger for more anxiety.
“So much of [anxiety] is about attention,” Gibson says. “If you believe you’re anxious, you might find yourself seeking out more anxiety-inducing stimuli. Whereas if you are more neutral, you can create more choice around where you direct your attention.”
She explains that our brains are wired to seek out the negative; evolutionarily, scanning our environment for signs of threat can protect us when danger arises. But when we find ourselves, consciously or unconsciously, always scanning for danger—whether it’s feeding ourselves a steady diet of news headlines throughout the day, or searching the internet for the root of our every ache and pain, then our radar for danger remains activated, and we, in turn, stay on high alert.
What to do instead?
“Look for glimmers instead of triggers,” says Gibson. What comforts you? The thought of lunch with a friend? Getting lost in a Netflix series? Baking, biking, or traveling?
Discussing the daily headlines with a friend helps me understand and feel some control over what’s happening, while my husband prefers to read but NOT discuss them. Pay attention to what calms you, don’t judge yourself, and do more of whatever helps.
Gibson adds that it’s important not to gloss over the complexities of what’s making us fearful but also to acknowledge that we can’t take on the whole of everything all the time. It helps when we join a movement of activists engaged in the same issue.
Seek “10% solutions,” she says, meaning be picky and realistic about the external problems you can tackle. “Taking small steps can lead to big change when lots of people are doing it at the same time.”
Accept reality.
I first read The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck 40 years ago, but I have never forgotten the opening line of the book: “Life is difficult.” Once we accept this fact, Peck assures us, life is easier because it is in the fight against reality that we create our own pain, keeping us stuck in an endless loop of wishing things were different.
I would like to say that when I was laid off from my job, I swiftly went from grief to acceptance — but I did not. But when I finally stopped railing against its " unfairness,” I wrote a plan for a literary arts program and then asked for—and got—the job running it.
Making peace with the reality of my situation removed me from the loop of despair and allowed me to move forward. Resilience begins in acceptance, not agony, and from resilience we can enact change.
How do you deal with life's many challenges? Let us know in the comments below.
Tara Anand
Follow Article Topics: Healthy-Aging
