Q&A 26 – Anxiety and Urgency: Does your past matter?

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When we experience feelings of anxiety and urgency do we need to dig into the past to figure out where they started in order to deal with and resolve them?

In this episode I explore how the answer to that question is actually, ‘no’. Feelings of urgency and anxiety are feedback from our innate wisdom. We experience them so that they can help us and when we see them this way they begin to dissipate without any kind of intervention, pharmaceutical or otherwise.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. 

Show Notes

• How urgency and anxiety fall in the same family of feelings
• What anxiety and urgency are really trying to tell us
• How we misunderstand that message
• How we’re designed to settle down automatically
• What to do (if anything) when we feel anxiety or urgency

Transcript of episode

Hello, explorers, and welcome to Q&A episode 26 of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. 

I’m here today with a question from someone who emailed me over the weekend. And I thought it was a really good subject so that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

The question is, does our past matter when we’re dealing with things like anxiety and urgency? 

This is such a good question because in the old psychological paradigm, the one that we’re so used to, and the one that most self-help type books and courses and understanding are based on our past does matter, it really matters. And we need to dig into that past in order to heal or resolve the things that are going on with us in the present. 

What I’m here today to share is that actually, our past is a lot less important than we think it is. 

As I say that, I want to emphasize that I’m not trying to negate the things that happened to you or to me in the past, and the feelings that we had about those. About neglectful upbringings or trauma that we experienced in the past. So this is the caveat at the beginning, I’m not framing this in a way, or trying to get across the message, that your past doesn’t actually matter because of course, that’s not true. 

What I’m going to talk about is how, when we’re looking for resolution to problems that we’re having, or things that we’re experiencing in this day, in this particular case, we’re going to talk about anxiety and urgency, is that the past isn’t the place to look. That’s what I’m that’s what I’m trying to emphasize. 

So let’s talk about the question that I received from a listener was about, specifically about urgency. Another thing I want to say too, and I’ve talked about in the past, and this is why she actually emailed me, I’ve talked in the past about how urgency is one of the things that I’ve dealt with in the past. And it took me a while to realize, and I’ll share this with you guys that:

Urgency and anxiety are the same thing. I think of them as falling under the same umbrella, or the same family of experiences that we have there. 

They’re specific in that they might feel like, like someone with anxiety might feel like they don’t feel a sense of urgency, and vice versa. But the two experiences are trying to bring you the same message, they’re just doing it in a slightly different way. And that’s really important when it comes to exploring those situations via this inside out understanding. 

The metaphor I thought of just before I hit record here is that, imagine that you have a weed in your garden. And it’s unsightly, it’s something that you don’t want there on your lawn or in your flowerbeds, or whatever. And the way that we tend to deal with weeds, or the best way to deal with them as far as I know, I’m an amateur gardener, is to really dig down. When we’re pulling out the weed we make sure that we pull out all the roots. Just chopping it off at the top isn’t going to do anything because it’s going to grow back. 

So that metaphor about the weed is a really good explanation of the old paradigm of psychology, that we innocently in the past have felt that dealing with uncomfortable feelings that come up like urgency and anxiety. What we needed to do was dig way, way down to the tiny roots where they just become almost like hairs. They’re so thin and small and fragile, deep down there in the earth. 

I certainly had therapists who helped me to do that. I would bring up the feeling of urgency or anxiety and we would dig into the past. Where did that come from? Was there a specific incident that I can recall where I felt that kind of urgency when I was really young? Where did it begin? That kind of exploration again, completely innocently. 

We do the best we can with the end information we have in the moment. So that’s the old paradigm way of dealing with these feelings like urgency and anxiety. 

In this inside-out exploration, we’re really turning that on its head. Because if you’re experiencing urgency or anxiety, it’s not actually necessary to go digging back into your past, to look at the root of where that experience came from. And here’s why. It’s not because your feelings and your experience, and your history don’t matter. But the reason we say you don’t need to dig into the past is because that feeling of urgency or anxiety that you’re experiencing, is telling you something different than we’ve been led to believe. 

What it’s telling you is that your thinking is really revved up. 

So the feeling of urgency or anxiety isn’t a problem in itself. It’s actually an alarm bell, you might want to say, although that that wording makes me feel a little anxious. It’s a signal, it’s a piece of feedback from your brilliant design that is filled with wisdom, your human design. And what it’s alerting you to is that your thinking is really revved up. And it’s not to be trusted in this moment. This is not the moment when you’re going to make good choices or healthy choices, because you’re coming from a real place of fear, and lack, and a lack of understanding about how you work, how you’re designed to return to a state of peace, and calm and quiet and wisdom. 

Innocently, in the past, before we knew about this inside-out understanding when we feel a sense of urgency or anxiety, we would do one of two things. 

1. We would dig into the past, as I’ve mentioned, trying to find the root source of that feeling in order to eradicate it, get rid of it, you know, heal it in some way.
2. And then the other thing we would do is we would look at the feeling itself as a problem. Like I’m feeling this sense of urgency or anxiety. And it’s really, it’s a problem, some part of me is broken. And I need to get rid of this feeling. I need to medicate it or I need to resolve it by stopping doing the activities that I’m interested in. Let’s say driving on a freeway, because that’s what makes me anxious. 

The reality is that none of that is true, that your feeling of urgency or anxiety is actually a perfect part of your design. And it’s simply bringing you information, and letting you know that your thinking is really revved up. And that, like I said a little bit earlier that your thinking can’t be trusted in this moment. And it’s a reminder that if you just let yourself settle, knowing that your design is its default is calm and clarity and wisdom, that at some point in the future, this feeling of anxiousness or anger or urgency will dissipate. 

If you’re watching on YouTube, I’m just going to scoot out of the frame for one second. I want to grab my snow globe. So the metaphor we often use in this instance, is that of a snow globe. And if you’re watching on YouTube, I’ve got a little snow globe here, and I’m just shaking it up. So when we’re experiencing urgency and anxiety, those snowflakes are swirling around inside that snow globe and making us feel like we need to do something about them in that moment.

But if you know anything about snow globes, you know that if you just set them down, all the swirling snow just settles to the bottom of the snow globe. That’s how it’s designed.

There’s nothing you could do once you said set the snow globe down to make that snow swirl around again. Gravity is doing its job. 

What we innocently do when we get really concerned about urgency or anxiety that we feel when we misunderstand what its purpose is, we were innocently shaking the snow globe up even more. So it might start to settle. And then we just start to add more and more thinking to it. What does this mean? Does this mean I’m broken? How am I going to deal with this? What am I going to do if I need to drive on the freeway sometime tomorrow> All that kind of thinking just adds more swirling activity to the snow globe. 

When we understand that life is moving through us, that we’re experiencing our thinking via our feelings, and we know that we’re designed to settle down, then we come to understand that there’s nothing we need to do about those feelings. 

Personally, I can tell you that the urgency that I experienced for years, and it. dogged me all the time. And it did that for a specific reason. Because that way that we are designed that message that’s trying to get through to me, to let me know that my thinking is really stirred up, is never going to give up until we see it for what it is. So for 30 years I dealt with, I describe it as a feeling that there was a demon breathing on the back of my neck all the time telling me to go faster and do more and that I couldn’t rest or relax.

It cropped up in all kinds of different ways. One of the things that’s easy to describe is that if I was ever out and about, and I mean, this went on for decades, if I was ever out and about running errands, and had a list or in my head, I had four or five errands to run, I would get maybe two of them done maybe three, and then the pressure from that voice screaming on the back of my neck to be finished with at all would just get to be too much. And I would say Oh, forget it, I’m not going to do these last two or three errands, I’m just going to go home. 

That would ease it off a little bit. And at the time, that seemed like the logical thing to do. I want to emphasize this as well, we’re always doing what we think is best for ourselves. We’re always trying to feel better. So I don’t blame myself or you for doing what we’ve done in the past to try to deal with those really, really uncomfortable feelings. 

When I began to learn about this understanding, and I began to see that feeling of urgency for what it was – that it was simply letting me know about the state of my thinking – the more I remembered that, the more those feelings of urgency and anxiety could dissipate, they could go away. And now I experienced them really rarely. 

And the important thing to remember is I still am divinely designed, I’m still tapped in like you are like all of us are to wisdom. So when I’m in a situation, and I feel a lot of urgency, butterflies in my stomach, or that feeling of needing to rush and, and be really fast about doing something. Now, most of the time, I remember Oh, right. Okay, this feeling doesn’t mean that I do actually have to go faster. If I’m replying to an email or recording a podcast episode. All it’s telling me is that my thinking is very busy. And I can wait and that thinking will calm down. 

So in the case of let’s say I was feeling that urgency feeling while replying to somebody’s email. Let’s just say for example, I might take a few deep breaths and kind of remind myself that I don’t have to go super fast. I can take my time replying to the email. And remember that for whatever reason, something has just made my thinking speed up. 

The other thing I can do sometimes as well, I’ll just save this email, and I’ll come back to it when I’m in a calmer state of mind. The same thing happens actually, when I’m having conversations with people. If I suddenly start to feel like a real sense of urgency, and like I want to interrupt the person that I’m talking to, or that I really want them to stop talking so that I can get my point across. That’s simply feedback. That’s just letting me know that I’m really caught up in my thinking. 

The best thing I can do for myself, and probably for the other person as well, in the conversation, is just let myself settle. And that may not be the moment to say the thing I want to say, I might want to wait until I feel like I’m in a much calmer, quieter state of mind. 

And remember, I don’t have to do anything to get there. That’s just going to happen automatically. The same way that the snowflakes in the snow globe just settled down on their own as soon as we set our thinking down. 

I hope that’s been helpful for you, if you’re dealing with any sense of anxiety, or urgency. And again, if you have any questions and you’d like me to address them on a future q&a episode, I’ll be happy to do that. You can go to Alexandraamor.com/question, and fill out the form there and I’ll be happy to answer. 

Thank you again for being with me here today. I hope you are well and I will talk to you again next week. See you later. Bye.

Featured image photo by Jake Blucker on Unsplash