The Real Cause of Anxiety and Stress According to this Modern-Day Buddha
And here’s the only thing we can do about it.
“I’ve been through some terrible situations in my life and some of them actually happened.” — Mark Twain
Are anxiety and stress an illusion?
Yes, while the feelings of anxiety in our bodies are very real, is what makes us anxious and stressed simply in our heads?
Many teachings in both spirituality and psychology point to our distorted cognitions as the cause of our anxiety.
But what exactly is anxiety?
Physiologically, we know that the feelings of anxiety are the result of our body’s sympathetic nervous system preparing our fight or flight response to a perceived “danger” in our environment.
This response began as a way for our prehistoric ancestors to mobilize all their bodily resources so they can survive an attack from some tiger lurking in the trees looking to make them their dinner.
For us modern humans, the events that trigger anxiety are far less catastrophic but what’s happening physically inside of us still manifests in the same way.
Whether it’s due to our jobs, finances, or dealings with others, every time we experience anxiety our body is preparing itself to deal with that attack from the proverbial tiger hiding in the trees.
But, on a personal level, in terms of our everyday lives, what is anxiety?
The common theme of anxiety held by many spiritual teachings always seems to boil down to our monkey mind and its propensity to run amuck.
So, maybe the most matter-of-fact way to describe anxiety is to say it’s the end result when the world isn’t conforming to the way we want it to be.
Legendary MBA professor Srikumar Rao who is referred to as “The Buddha of Success and Happiness” summed it up simply as:
“There is one reason and one reason only that you feel stress, and that is that you have a very rigid idea of how the universe should be, and the universe is not playing ball with you.”
Let’s consider all the things that make us anxious and stressed in our daily lives. We are likely to find that majority are trivial matters that produce a low-level form of anxiety that is always with us and never seems to go away.
We can group them into four categories:
- Everything happening in the world outside of us: the terrible stuff you read and see on the news, widespread disease, the economy, terrorism, corrupt political leaders, etc. Every day it feels like there is something new to be scared of.
- Situations that arise that make us feel personally inconvenienced: changes at our job, dealing with coworkers who annoy us, attending to matters in our home life, obligations with our family and friends, etc.
- The parts of our life we are unsatisfied with. This includes everything from our career and business goals, our physical appearance, the status of our relationship, to the type of home we live in, all the way to what college we want our child to attend.
- The epidemic of too much to do and not enough time to do it which is the mother of all daily anxiety and stress. This is our long to-do list that we never seem to put a dent in. It’s the overwhelm from managing all the different facets in our life: work deadlines, family, personal goals, our health, etc.
The hamster wheel of anxiety… why can’t we get off it?
As put simply in a seminar by Srikumar Rao:
Much of anxiety is mental chatter.
What is mental chatter?
Listen closely. Do you hear it?
There it is.
It’s that voice in your head right now talking to you while you’re skimming this article wondering what this dude is talking about.
Mental chatter is the ongoing internal monologue happening in our heads that is always with us talking to us that we can never get to shut the hell up.
Mental chatter is what prevents us from ever fully being in the present moment by either keeping us worried about the future or dwelling over the past.
It’s what always turns a slightly unpleasant situation into a dire one.
Mental chatter is the second arrow.
Mental chatter is the classic example of the Buddha’s metaphor of how shooting the “second arrow” is what creates our suffering. Meaning, the first arrow represents everything that happens to us in the world and all the things that we wish were different in our lives, but the second arrow is the real dagger because it’s how we react to it. It’s the worries, judgments, and stories we tell ourselves when the world is not conforming to the way we want it to be (a.k.a. anxiety).
Having a heated argument with our significant other turns into the fear that they will leave us.
Feverishly trying to meet an important deadline at work becomes an act of desperation not to get fired.
When a health concern pops up for us or a loved one, we’re already anticipating being stricken with the worst of the worst ailments.
Trust me I get it, a while back I had an issue with my eyes and I had myself believing I was going blind.
Things happen in our lives and we start to live in the imaginary world of worst-case scenarios.
The second arrow is what fuels our anxiety and stress which is always inflicted by our mental chatter.
How do you eradicate mental chatter?
Unfortunately, you don’t.
In the words of spiritual leader Sadhguru from his book Mind is your Business:
“There is no subtraction or division in the mind, there is only addition and multiplication. You cannot take away anything by force from the mind.”
All we can do is become the observer of our mental chatter and not be whisked away by it on a private jet off to no man’s land.
In other words, accept the inevitable slings of the first arrow… that more often than not the universe is not going to conform to our rigid view of it.
But more importantly, recognize when you sling the second one courtesy of the turmoil created in your mind.
When I’m successful at doing so, I like to smile and say to myself:
“There I go again shooting that second arrow.”