By Dina Aldabbagh

I’m reading a recipe for how to hate your life, and I realized I’m all out of anxiety, do you think the neighbor will have any? Oh, I don’t want to bother, I can just make some at home. First step: take whatever future problem you’re worried will happen and stress about it right now. This is a crucial step in perpetuating the lack of emotional safety you feel about the future, so that instead, you can feel it right now!

When you feel a lack of safety about the future and worry about it now, that worry is allowing you to live in that lack of safety that you fear you’ll feel later — right now. The fear of a future emotion manifests its presence now. You’re so worried things will go wrong “soon,” “one day,” “when you do this thing in the future,” that your body is perpetually disposed to stress. Your worry about a looming threat is putting you in this constant state of fight or flight and taking away all of your safety, because when the body perceives danger, the nervous system is activated — leading to literal physiological changes. 

This danger can either be real or perceived and still trigger your fight or flight. “You’re going to worry yourself sick!” is accurate. Worry yourself sick. You can think about your problems and produce the same chemistry as if they were real. Constant, perpetual stress makes your body sick. Our nervous systems need regulation, but they can’t regulate when they’re in a hypervigilant mode. Therefore, you need to give your nervous system safety in order to be able to regulate.

When you’re not allowing your nervous system to feel a sense of safety, you’re making it a lot harder for your body to be able to perform certain functions that we can’t consciously influence — among which include digestion, blood pressure, heart beat, metabolic functioning, wound healing, and aging. The body is smart, and it wants to survive. If it sees these functions — that are necessary to its survival  — being constantly dysregulated and stifled, it’s going to do something. And worse, most of us have been in this dysregulated state for so long — years on end — that this is our norm, and our nervous system has been working in overdrive to get the proper signals sent out to the body. So at this point, our bodies are screaming at us. And what do these screams sound like? They sound like the intense urge to do an action in pursuit of safety. 

Every single day, we are doing thing after thing in the pursuit of putting ourselves in a more safe position, whether we realize it or not. If you were to really take a look at all of the actions that make up your behavior, and questioned, “Why do I do this thing?” you’d see that at its core, it’s a pursuit of safety. You explaining yourself is your attempt to keep yourself safe from whatever consequences could come from others misunderstanding your intentions or the events that passed. You feeling like you must text back the second you get a message, even when you’re busy, is perhaps because you’re afraid of what other people will do if you don’t communicate immediately, or you’re afraid of the blame you’ll put on yourself if things don’t go to plan and you know you didn’t respond the first second you could. 

“Something bad will happen if I don’t.” Your intense, unignorable urge to overeat even though your stomach is starting to hurt is your nervous system’s attempt to put you in a temporary state of safety. When you eat, it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which slows your heart rate, encouraging rest. Ultimately, eating sends a signal to the nervous system that you’re safe. 

So maybe you’re not craving a text back from that person or a bowl of cereal, maybe you’re just craving safety. Maybe you’re not just “a talker.” Maybe, at your core, you don’t actually love sharing every personal detail about yourself — perhaps it’s a learned behavior, triggered by your nervous system’s drive to seek safety. When you don’t allow your body to be in a state of calm, it’ll ask you to do things that consciously or subconsciously, you don’t even want to do. It will send you this urge to do something where it almost feels like someone is forcing your hand. You could fully not want to do this thing, but you can’t not; it’s insatiable. If it delivered any little bit of safety to a nervous system that is void of safety in the past, then the urge to perform what brought the safety will only get stronger and stronger. 

How much of the way you act and think is really you and how much of it is a learned behavior in the pursuit of safety? And I wonder…how many behaviors would simply fall off from your life if you regulated your nervous system? What would feel unnecessary?

So much of the looming threat of danger that triggers our fight or flight is a perceived threat — experienced in and by our minds over and over again. It can create a pattern of behavior performed by you that is actually harmful to yourself, yet feels unstoppable. Some event occurs, it triggers you, you feel unsafe, you do something in pursuit of safety — that’s the logical process of the fight or flight response. But then what about these actions that hurt us more than help us? They still feel crucial, like they must happen, even though in our thinking mind we know they’re not good for us. 

Maybe it shows up with eating. You know in your mind that you don’t want to eat past a comfortable point for you, because when you do, it literally hurts your body. It pushes your stomach out to the brim and you get pings of pain. Emotionally, you’re hurt too. You feel weak, distressed, and powerless, but you do it time and time again. Your dysregulated nervous system created a pattern in which when you don’t feel safe emotionally, you physically manifest that lack of safety by ignoring your body’s needs and limitations. While eating is meant to be the solution to a problem — i.e. solving hunger — it then becomes the problem. You may feel like you can’t stop yourself, but let me tell you, it’s not about the food. It’s an attempt to find safety. 

If when you were triggered to eat past fullness, you paused and looked at what you were thinking about in the time leading up — or, trying not to think about — you may realize that it was something that made you feel anxious, and therefore, unsafe. So much of the time, it’s not a threat that’s in front of your face; it’s not something going on right now. It’s less about your lack of safety in this exact moment and more about your anticipation of the lack of your safety in the future.  

I walked past a crying baby being held by its dad and the mom started very lightly singing a song and then the baby stopped crying. “How simple children are,” I thought. Nothing changed in the environment, but the baby was soothed. The “threat” was gone and its sense of safety returned. That is the clearest example of what we all seek: soothing. Babies are honest representations of human beings. If you try singing a song to them when they’re crying, but the issue is that they have a full diaper, they won’t stop crying by you singing; you’ve got to change that diaper. There’s a need there that the cry is trying to communicate must be met. But other times, the baby’s nervous system is just overstimulated, and all it’s seeking is some safety — so the song works. 

Maybe you didn’t grow up with the song singing type of parents. Maybe you just needed someone to sing a song to you, not to solve all your problems, just someone to put you at ease. Then somewhere along the way, you developed your own modalities to put yourself at ease — porn, drugs, food, social media, romantic attention. So when you start worrying about these future problems, things you can’t solve right now, you just need soothing. 

Eating is your song singing for a future potential problem that can’t be solved right now. It’s you easing the current moment. But if you want to find a different song because this one is hurting you, you can. Even if you didn’t have the proper song being sung to you as a child, you’re an adult now. You have the tools to soothe yourself, and that’s the job you are tasked with. 

To worry about all your future problems constantly is a learned behavior to try to ensure your future safety, but all it does is take away your current safety. And this current moment is all we actually ever have. You’re scared. You’re worried about a future today that is going to come some time from now. In an attempt to avoid the stress then, you’re getting stressed now. So…does it ever actually help you? You’re worrying that something outside of you will take away your safety in the future…so you’re doing it to yourself right now. Do you recognize how berzerk that is? You must see the sense in order for your brain to realize that this behavior is not actually helping you. 

Realistically, if something does happen in the future, then you may be uncomfortable for a period of time, but you completely have the power and ability to change whatever needs to be changed in order to give yourself safety and a good living environment. But as of right now, you don’t know how it’s going to shake out, and you cannot solve a problem before it even comes up. You can’t do anything about something that hasn’t happened yet. You just have to know that you are safe in this moment right now, and when the “this moment right now” of your future comes up, you will use all the skill set and ability you have to be safe in that moment. “Am I at risk right now?” No? Okay, well that’s because everything you’ve done leading up to this point has led due to a place of safety. You can do that again and again and however many times you need. 

Trying to do something about a future problem that might come up? That’s just such a non issue right now. Don’t make it an issue by thinking yourself sick. That doesn’t mean that times of issue will not come, but that you have everything you need in order to make sure that you feel safe again. 

You are not a kid anymore. You’re an adult who has developed the necessary skills to change your life and provide yourself with safety. You might not know how to completely change everything, but surely you know enough from all this life you’ve lived to change something, bringing you closer to a place of safety. Self- regulation is a necessary pillar of living life, you must simply recognize what need of yours is looking to be met in that moment, and provide yourself with that. 

I find that making sense of situations is an incredible way to combat anxious thoughts. Going along with our earlier example, maybe you think your friends will hate you if you don’t text back immediately. What if when you felt the urge to text back right away, you said, “Nothing’s going to happen,” so you don’t have to do anything. Why would you have to do something about nothing? If nothing were going to happen, why would you have to act — right? 

This is where self-regulation comes in, because you don’t actually know they won’t hate you if you don’t text back. In nearly all contexts, it’s completely insane, but they still might; you can’t control other people. So, you can put yourself at ease by saying, “Even if they do — even if the worst happens — I’ll be fine.” And make sense of it: “Why would I want to be friends with people who are so quick to turn on me for such a simple thing?” Really, who would? Is that what a friend is to you? What qualities do you value in a friend? Once you can lay out the logic, you can mentally work through the situation and realize that you have nothing to stress about. Cue the sigh of relief. Do this with each situation that comes up and you’re working yourself towards a regulated nervous system. 

You can choose to reject the stress of the future, and only accept what this current moment is offering you. In a world where our nervous systems have been hijacked for years on end, we don’t realize that we are actually safer than we think. We don’t require such rash, harmful action in order to feel safe. We can just flow, allow, and trust.