Recognize Anxiety – Our senses are an amazing compass at times. Touching and feeling a soft Minky Couture blanket against your skin can melt you into great evening sleep. Smelling your first, out of the oven chocolate chip cookie is a lasting smell you don’t forget. Tasting that same first cookie makes it a permanent scar. Seeing that first wave from the ocean rush at you while your legs are in the water is something indescribable.
Hearing your newborn baby cry for the first time in your arms is a lasting, euphoric memory that parents would describe as life-altering. But have you ever wondered if that internal mental compass that guides you is trying to tell you something that one of these senses doesn’t recognize? I can tell you from firsthand experience, to recognize anxiety and be able to cope with it takes another realm of a sense that defies logic.
Recognize Anxiety
Science is predictable, it’s logical, and by its very definition is provable and recognizable by data and experiments. Dealing with your first brain fog moment, or your first tug at your skin from within your own body wanting to jump out of your skin is a sense that is not science or logical with data.
There are shaky, mental moments within anxiety and depression that you can’t describe with one of the 5 senses. Describing an anxiety attack to someone is like describing a head-on collision with a semi-truck if you’ve never been in a car accident.
I remember like it was yesterday ( it was 16 years ago) when I had my first anxiety attack. Imagine it’s your 38th Birthday. You are living what you think is your best life. Great job, climbing the corporate ladder before age 40, a wife, two great kids, and a beautiful, sunny day in UTAH where the mountains are beaming at you. Sounds like all of my 5 senses should be hitting on all cylinders right? Wrong. I was reading the morning paper at my favorite restaurant with the day off from work. I had just received my sausage and eggs when all of the sudden I had no sense at all.
Just one of my 5 senses was enacted.
Fear
Fear of dying. My heart started to race, I felt like the walls of that restaurant were closing in and at that moment I knew something was seriously wrong with my senses. The next thing I knew I was hooked up to wires and monitors laying in a booth right inside that restaurant with much older people than me staring at me. I felt ashamed, old and I was ready to jump out of my skin. I was not able to recognize anxiety at all, until that moment when I knew I had a 6th sense. Fear and anger.
I was holding in so much from my past. Abandonment from my father as a youth, loss of a previous marriage where I felt like a failure and I was realizing I was not yet where the societal norming of monetary success thought I should be. I was living a shell of a life. I was living by falsely thinking my life was determined by the amount of money I was making or how large of a corporate ladder I could climb with a management tag tied to my forehead.
In conclusion
Fortunately, 16 years removed from that moment, I can recognize the signs and begin to take steps to develop my 6th sense. Awareness that I’m holding things in again. Fear and anger have a way of sitting in our soft tissue. It’s like a boiling pot that eventually will flow over if you don’t deal with the signs your body will give you.
But, as I’ve learned, like an alcoholic or a gambling addict has come to grips with at that breaking point, recognition is the first step to recovery. My 6th sense and your 6th sense is to recognize what we are holding in our body, mind, heart, and soul that must start to release for us to heal.
Contact Scott at Wake Up Sence today Scott@Wakeupsence.com
