What are anxiety and anger and why does it come up in our lives so much? Anxiety and anger are physical responses that the body turns on to keep you alive. The body’s purpose is to keep you living. That is why you crave food that is high in energy. This is why your brain justifies not exercising and expending energy. This is why we run away from or get angry at situations that appear to be problematic. The anxiety and anger response is part of the sympathetic nervous system. This is otherwise known as the flight/fight/freeze state or the survival state.

 The sympathetic nervous system will be turned on when the mind is trying to solve problems that it doesn’t have answers to. For example, if you are driving down the road and you get a flat on your tire, you will feel anxious or angry (flight/fight). As soon as you realize you have roadside assistance, your mind will recognize a solution and you will no longer feel anxious/angry. Solutions can turn off the sympathetic nervous system.

If you are thinking of a problem in the past, your mind is thinking about problems that you will not have solutions to. Your body will turn on the sympathetic nervous system, but it will not be able to turn it off. Furthermore, if you think of a problem while triggering the sympathetic nervous system state, your brain is not going to let you forget it.

If you drive to Walmart and you get into a car wreck, your body will experience that in the sympathetic nervous system state. Because this experience happened in a state of survival, the brain is not going to want to let go of it. The brain will believe that this is necessary information. When you drive by the spot where the wreck occurred, your brain will remind you of the wreck. Your brain will also bring the memory to your mind frequently so that you will not forget it. The brain wants you to remember things that you experience in the survival nervous system state because the brain is trying to keep you alive.

            If you drive to Walmart and you buy a gallon of milk, you will experience that in a parasympathetic or calm state. Because this experience happened in a state of calm, your brain will not believe it is necessary for your survival and your brain will allow you to forget the information.

            When you remember past events, you remember those events in a way that either puts your body in a sympathetic or a parasympathetic nervous system state. The key to regulating and healing from those emotions is dependent upon which state our body is in while we process through those emotions.

            Every memory that is experienced in a sympathetic nervous system state (fight/flight/freeze) is going to be determined to be important by the brain. This is because the sympathetic nervous system is built for survival. The sympathetic nervous system turns on when we are trying to fix an unsolvable problem. It also turns on when we are experiencing secondary emotions such as anger, anxiety, and fear.

Every memory that is experienced in a parasympathetic nervous system state (relaxed) is going to be determined to be unimportant by the mind. This means that the mind will start to let these memories fad because they are not necessary for survival. The mind determines this because the memory is experienced in a relaxed state. We can be sad, disappointed, or embarrassed in a relaxed state. When we do this, our brain says that memories that are associated with the parasympathetic state are not necessary for our survival and we let them go.

Intervention 

Emotions will become stuck and unmoving if we do the following.

Step 1: Try to look at the past as something I need to solve. There is nothing wrong with learning from mistakes, but once I am done learning from them, I need to then let the past go. If I spend all of my time thinking about what I wish I would have done or what other people should have done then I am signaling to my mind that the memory is a problem that needs to be solved. This will turn on the sympathetic nervous system response.

Step 2: If I experience fear, anxiety, or anger in response to the memory. These emotions are survival emotions and will also evoke a sympathetic nervous system response.

Emotions will begin to flow if I do the following.

Step 1: I accept the past and stop trying to fix it. Meaning, I am done learning from my mistakes and I no longer ask myself the “would have”, “could have,” or “should have.”

Step 2. I take the secondary emotion, like anger, anxiety, or fear, and move it to a primary emotion, like sadness, disappointment, or embarrassment. I can move the emotion to any primary emotion.

I then relax my body into the state of acceptance and primary emotion. The result is that my body will learn to pair a relaxed state with the emotion. This will look like me reconditioning myself to relax in the context of the memory. I know that I am done thinking about the memory when my mind gets bored with it and it randomly starts thinking about something else. I should not get anxious and force myself to stop thinking about it. Every time we run from something we are anxious about, it trains our body to create higher levels of anxiety. This is because our body has discovered that if it creates anxiety, we will remove ourselves from the threat. Instead, we should allow the memory to sit in our mind until we naturally become calm and the mind naturally drifts off in a different direction.