How to Use Anxiety – and Not Be Used by It!

So I'd like to explore with you here, uh, the topic of anxiety, and I wanna start with what we could call healthy anxiety, and then we could call, hmm, problematic anxiety.

And I want to approach this from both a Buddhist perspective and from the perspective of modern neuropsychology.

So on the one hand, anxiety is perfectly normal and has an evolved survival function.

It provides signals to us about threat.

There's what's called signal anxiety in psychology.

That's its useful purpose.

And it alerts us to, you know, the tiger that might be dwelling in the bushes.

It might alert us as well to what will happen if, you know, we don't, uh, I don't know, listen carefully to our partner, [laughs] you know, or what might happen if we don't go see that doctor about this funny lump in our, in our neck.

There's a place for healthy anxiety.

In the world around us, to be, uh, anxious about things that feel like they're falling apart in your country or worried on behalf of others.

A lot of anxiety is on behalf of others.

My wife and I have two adult kids and you better believe we worry about them.

[laughs] We're proud of worrying about them, and we intend to keep worrying about them even if they don't want us to.

So there's a place for that kind of anxiety too.

It's natural, of course.

I'll tell you a little story about myself and rock climbing.

When I very first started climbing really seriously in my early twenties, I would go to bed at night, camping out, lying in my sleeping bag near my friend who was my climbing partner.

And as I was falling asleep, I would suddenly have an extremely vivid sense of tumbling through the air down the face of the thousand or more foot cliff we had been climbing that day, doo, doo, doo, doo, doo, falling down toward the hard boulders at the bottom to smack on them.

Whoa.

You know, that was a shocker.

So I would pull myself up and out of that experience, shake it off, [laughs] whoa, and then start falling back into sleep again.

And then, bloop, there I was, tumbling in space, falling to my death, you know, to smack on the boulders below.

And after I think the third time of that, then I thought, "Well, harrumph." And so as I'm falling asleep, then it starts again and I let it happen.

I let it go all the way to completion where, smack, right on that gray, I can see it here now, gray granite flat boulder.

And then in the moment just before, a millisecond just before impact, I realized, oh, what I was experiencing was an upsurge of the fear that I had been suppressing all day long as an inexperienced young climber on the lead, so that if I fell, you know, I might go twenty or thirty or more feet with a little tiny piece of metal holding me.