Anxiety is your guard dog

General
1

Today I received this email and thought I would make a discussion out of it. Its from PanicAway.com

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My family used to have this great dog called Shadow.

He was a cross between a collie and black Labrador. (See him below)

He used to sit all day long in the front room of our house waiting for anyone to come to the front door. When someone would finally arrive, he would go absolutely bonkers!

Until…we invited the person in.

If we kept the person at the door, (for example the Fed-ex guy), he would bounce off the walls barking loudly with all the hair standing on his back.

No matter how hard you tried to tell him to lie down and stop barking, he would not listen.

His reasoning was:“I am the guard of this house and if my owner does not invite a person in, then that person is unwanted and therefore a threat.”

I sometimes used to keep friends standing at the door for a few minutes and then let them in (if they were brave enough), just to see the change in Shadow’s reaction.

It was the same every time.Once they passed the front door, he would immediately stop barking and sit back down on his seat.

Anxiety is just like a guard dog. It is your protector.

It is your fight or flight response activated by the emotional part of your brain designed to keep you from harm.

It needs you the owner (your rational brain) to reassure it that the unusual bodily sensations, that pay you a visit, are not a real threat and that all is well.

But just saying ‘everything is OK, calm down now’ does not work.

Just like Shadow, it responds much better to your actions. You need to mentally invite the anxiety in.

If you keep the door on anxiety closed, your emotional brain thinks that the threat is real and there is something to be afraid of.

When you invite your anxious sensations in with total acceptance of them, your emotional brain (your guard dog) backs off and calms down.

So don’t keep all your anxious bodily sensations knocking on the door upsetting your guard dog.

Open the door and let them in.

Accept them fully and watch as your guard dog settles back down into a calm state.

Barry

P.S. I have been using an analogy of a guard dog and anxiety. Now I want you to share with me your particular analogy of anxiety.

So I pose that question to our board...What is your analogy of anxiety? Do you think we use this analogy also with our pain?

Stacey

2

I notice that anxiety hits when I am not in control. This article is very interesting. As I sit here anxiously waiting to hear how my dad’s neck surgery goes that started at 7 pm! And is 3-4 hour surgery :(… I now think how can I allow this anxiety in instead of fighting it off!
Thank you for this.
Joy

3

I have some understand of animal behavior and this makes perfect sense to me. I like how you used it for analogy toward anxiety and pain. That was pretty clever of you... :)

For Pain:/ I sure do! Which is probably why I over do it so much.. hee hee

For my anxiety:/ It depends on what put me in that state OR what brought my episode about. For me - I have to take a break from the cause of it (ignore it) and I always have to rest to get it to calm down. If I can take a nap or sleep. Them I'm good again and I can think clearly and rationalize better. For me - An anxiety sensation is my warning that I'm headed into a seizure. ( I'm prone to seizures and gran malls). So it's important for me to get myself calmed down as soon as possible.

4

OK, so my double-aquarian brain sits there analyzing to death all of this. The id part of my consciousness started playing Paul McCartney & Wings song, "... Someone's knocking at the door/Somebody ringing the bell/Do me a favor/Open the door, and let 'em in...." LOLOLOL (hubby says my mind is scary!)

5

This is very true, I had to remember to calm myself more I found myself becoming more and more lost in anxiety , I wont even say my anxiety because I dont want to own it . But I stop we I begin to panic or if I feel it coming on , finding the calm safe zone of thought , and try pass the moment somehow .

6

Like many of you, I have also been pondering this email. At first my nice personality said in a whimsical voice "Allow the anxiety in. Accept it. Welcome it." Then my other personality, I call her Flo said, "Heck NO!, We will not allow anxiety in! We will not welcome it, we will not make a space in the crazy place we call home for anxiety!! Get that thought right out of your head, NOW!" LOL I love Flo! So then I thought, I like the idea of my anxiety being a dog. So I went with that analogy. So if my anxiety was a dog which kind of dog would it be? A lab, a black lab. OK, so now I can walk my lab, anxiety, with me and when he gets excited I can focus on calming him down instead of trying to calm down this feeling of anxiety. I have control. So yesterday my boss said, lets play hooky. Yippy, but he didn't tell us where we were going. My lab started to get excited. So I focused on him and calmed him down. And then as I'm driving to this mysterious place, following my boss I remembered something that I learned about 8 years ago. Feeling and emotions are things like a pencil or a piece of paper. And if you had a pencil in your hand and you wanted to get rid of it you would turn your hand over and drop the pencil. Problem solved, no more pencil. (Accept Flo would yell, pick up the pencil before you trip over it, LOL, she is a bit of a perfectionist!) I used that technique a lot during that time to get rid of anger and hurt about my father and my step father and everything else that stressed me during that time. So I thought anxiety is a thing! It is not me. I will not welcome it in because then I would have to "own" the anxiety. So I imagined the anxiety in my hand. I asked myself, "Are you ready to let the anxiety go?". At this point you can say no. That is a perfectly acceptable answer. Maybe you aren't ready to let the hurt, anger, or anxiety go. But then you have to ask yourself when you could let it go. I don't know is also an acceptable answer, but that has consequences because the hurt, fear and anxiety will continue to come back until you do let it go. By the way, I said "Heck yes!" so I turned my hand over and let the anxiety go. But then I noticed I was still holding on to the labs leash. The anxiety was still with me. I had to let the leash go and realize the dog didn't belong to me. Its someone else's dog. And imagine the dog running away. Now when ever I feel the anxiety coming back I can say you don't belong to me, I can rub its head give it a kiss and let it go back to its owner. So even though many of you are now saying "She really needs a good therapist!!" That is the way I'm going to deal with my anxiety. Now I'm trying to see if I can use the same technique for my pain, because Flo really doesn't like the pain. And if Flo isn't happy none of my personalities are happy. LOL Have a great day and gentle hugs to everyone.

Stacey

7

Oh no Flo is on a role! So I went to my 9:15 meeting and I was sitting there thinking while everyone else shared their information about how I could make an analogy out of the pain because just trying to release it didn't seem to be working. LOL So I asked if I could imagine my pain as some object what would it be? My nice personality said, "A unicorn? No they wouldn't hurt you. A rainbow? No, that won't work either. I'm out of ideas." Remember she is my nice personality. Then Flo says, "IT'S A DANG TIGER! And by the way she's ripping off your shoulders and she's brought a few friends who are gnawing at your feet!" I almost busted out laughing. Thankfully I didn't. So then I imagined this tiger sitting in front of me. How could I get this tiger to go away. Flo said "She isn't going away because she wants to rip you to pieces." Have I mentioned I love Flo's honesty. So I picked up my shot gun, loaded it with my imaginary bullets and shot the tiger 3 times. I'm probably still going to be in pain today but I had fun with the analogy. haha

Stacey

8

Hahaha! Love it!