What are stress, worry and anxiety really telling us?

It looks to me like stress, worry and anxiety are different flavours of the same sort of feeling. I don't know about you, but I have experienced them as a feeling of insecurity that may be accompanied by physical symptoms like tightening in stomach or the chest, shortness of breath, feeling spaced out, and so on.

So far as I can tell, these sorts of feelings are a universal part of the human experience – in other words everyone feels some variety of them from time to time. If we’re spending a lot of time in these feeling states this seems to me like an invitation to do two things:

1. Look at our self-care – simple things like are we getting enough rest, water, exercise, good nutrition and so on?

2. Check whether we are caught up in a misunderstanding about how our experience works – and this is what the rest of this article focusses on.

If it seems like the feelings of stress, worry or anxiety are telling us about our circumstances, other people and what they are or aren’t doing, our past, possible future events, what we’re like as a person or anything other than just simple feedback on how we’re feeling right now in this moment, this is a red flag that we are not seeing clearly how our experience works, in other words that we are caught up in a misunderstanding.

A simple example is a child with a teddy bear.* The child believes that their feelings of security, comfort and peace are coming from the teddy bear. But we know that’s not really possible, if we cut open the bear there aren’t any feelings in there. The feelings are being generated, real time, 100% from within the child. The teddy bear and the child’s experience of the teddy bear are two different things.

It’s the same thing with our circumstances. There are the circumstances and then there is our experience of the circumstances. It’s the same thing with other people and what they are or aren't doing. There are the people and what they are or aren’t doing and then there is our experience of the people and what they are or aren’t doing. And so on.

If we’re bringing to our experience (and we all do this at least some of the time) a belief that it’s possible for circumstances, other people (or objects like teddy bears), our past, possible future events or what we’re like as a person to create a feeling in us, we’re going to get stuck in a feedback loop where we constantly find more apparent reasons to feel stressed, worried or anxious, and everywhere we look we will find evidence for it working that way.

Until at some point we fall out of it into a nicer feeling – have you noticed that when this happens, sometimes the very thing we were worrying about doesn’t seem like a problem any more even through the external circumstance hasn’t changed?

So what if activating the stress/worry/anxiety response is nothing more than a habit we’ve got into? Us humans are awfully good at getting into habits without even realising it (I know, we don’t like to admit that readily but what makes us think we’re so different to all of the other humans who do it?)

There is so much peace on the other side of seeing for ourselves how our experience always works, that all our feelings are ever giving us feedback on is how we're feeling right now. It frees us up beautifully to be present in the moment, to access insight and know how to move forward, whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. And that’s a capacity we’ll also have in the future to deal with whatever comes up.

*Thanks to my mentor Jamie Smart for this beautifully simple way to illustrate where our feelings are coming from. Somehow it's easy to see with a teddy bear, but then we get caught up in believing that things like money, relationships and jobs can create a feeling in us, and doing all sorts of illogical things as a result.