Why does anxiety feel so bad?

I don’t think anxiety is an emotion, it is a state. A state which comes about when we haven’t been able to feel emotional pain, so it builds up, and we then become afraid of connecting with that mountain of pain and its sensations in the body.  As Deepak Chopra says in Ageless Body, Timeless Mind, hurt is the most basic negative [or uncomfortable] emotion we can feel. States like anxiety and depression are secondary formations once we learned not to feel or express our hurt in the moment.

It’s not as simple as that though. Not feeling pain, in the case of dissociation, is an automatic response from our autonomic nervous system. We do not have any control over it. Our system senses if an experience could be overwhelming and dissociation kicks in to protect us from the pain, as much as it can. Think about the times you’ve gone numb when something awful or overwhelming has happened. You didn’t make the choice to dissociate, it happened automatically.

We can also consciously avoid pain, this is sometimes called avoidance, emotional numbing and experiential avoidance. But what counts at the end of the day is the unfelt pain and how we go about feeling it safely and gently.

Anxiety is about the fear of going inside; where our pain is. Maybe that’s why anxiety can be difficult to work with, because to heal anxiety we need to learn a new way of being with all of our emotions, especially the uncomfortable ones, including, but not limited to, fear.

One of the most powerful techniques for feeling our pain is an exercise called pendulation from Peter Levine. It really works because instead of dissociating and avoiding, we learn to feel into the pain little by little (what Levine calls titration). Pendulation also gives us the experience that not all of our body feels horrible, there are also some parts that feel neutral, calm and good, whether it’s our elbow or little toe. Pendulating between a painful part and a calm part also gives us the experience of holding opposites which helps enlarge our container, or window of tolerance, for difficult emotions.

Try tapping on the sentences below, see what comes up and tap through the points with your answers.

Even though I’m afraid of going inside, I completely accept how I feel

Even though it all feels too big and overwhelming, I don’t know where to start, I can start where it feels safest to go

Even though this anxiety feels … I accept all of my feelings around this

Even though I want to rush things so I feel better, I know I’ve become overwhelmed in the past doing this, so I choose to take it slowly and gently