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CALMER CREATURE
Learning to Calm the Creature inside all of us
MEMBER'S PORTAL
EMOTIONS
UNDERSTANDING EMOTIONS
Anxiety is an emotional state that is within us all and serves a purpose, to keep us safe and alert us to potential dangers. Anxiety is has a very powerful physiological response.
Understanding that anxiety, stress and worry impact us emotionally, physically and cognitively helps us to understand why combatting anxiety is best approached from all three stances.
All our feelings have a physical effect on us. Too much sadness can make us feel tired. When we’re angry, our muscles can tense up. Anxiety makes us feel alert, with a fast heart, worried thoughts, and a funny feeling in our stomachs.
Anxiety can feel different for everyone because there are so many components at play. Feeling anxious activates different systems as our body prepares to stay safe.
It is important to remember that anxiety is intended to be an alert system and safety system. But sometimes the system overreacts to perceived threats.
WHAT HAPPENS TO OUR BODY WHEN WE BECOME ANXIOUS
The physiology of panic
Our body responds to the perceived threat when we become anxious, as if the threat were physically real in some cases. Let’s examine this reaction as if the threat were physically real.
The panic attack examined
Let us assume a large external creature is coming to fight you. In preparation for this you clinch your teeth (so if it strikes your face, your teeth do not get knocked loose). Your next move is to increase your breathing so you gain more oxygen to your leg muscles, lungs and heart. Now you are prepared to fight or run if needed. The blood pressure in your body rises as blood pumps faster into your heart.
Yet at the same time, there is less blood flow to your hands and feet. The lessened blood flow to your hands and feet makes it easier to strike the creature and not hurt as much as well as make cuts and injury to your hands less dangerous to you. It also makes you fumble small objects like pens and keys, but this is a time for fighting not for fine motor skills. However, this little fact makes your hands shaky and cold.
You begin to have an oily sweat, different from the sweat you have at the gym. This sweat clogs your pores, causes you to break out in weird places but makes it difficult for the creature to grab and keep a hold of you.
This oily sweat serves a purpose outside of staining your armpits on your favorite shirts. The sweat of stress smells different, feels different and functions differently than normal sweat.
Your muscles on your sides tense, so if the creature kicks your stomach and kidneys are protected. Overtime this causes lower back pain, but it protects your vital organs during the anxiety and stress.
The psoas muscle, sometimes called the fight or flight muscle, serves its purpose.
Finally, the stomach, it stops digesting and simultaneously decides it should void what is in the bowels and bladder. This way, regardless of fight or flight or freeze, you do not have a full bowel or bladder to have to worry about. Who wants to fight a creature when you have to go?
All of this serves a very real and functional purpose.
But what if the creature is psychological and not physical? Unfortunately, the body cannot really differentiate that a lot of the time so the anxiety reaction begins. Ideally, it remains at lower levels and does not escalate into panic. However, even moderate levels of anxiety can become exhausting and wear on the body.
THE POSITIVE ASPECT OF ANXIETY
It does serve a purpose
Having some anxiety is normal part of life, but learning how to calm anxiety, stress and worry and avert panic is essential to living a calmer lifestyle. Through this website and the calmer creature app you will gain instruction and information to learn to control your body’s reaction to stress and anxiety as well as how to manage your thoughts to reduce anxiety and stress.
Here are the functions of positive anxiety:
It alerts us that someone or something may be violating our boundaries.
This allows us to know that we need to protect ourselves or set a boundary.
It alerts us to danger in the environment or with a person.
This allows us to examine the environment or interaction and take action to protect ourselves.
It is a warning system.
Sometimes anxiety just sends up a signal to let us know that things are out of balance.
This is our warning signal to take a break and examine and correct course.
COPING WITH EMOTIONS
What to do if Anxiety, Fear, Worry or Anger get out of control
FIRST LINE DEFENSES.
REMEMBER TO RIDE THE WAVE.
Emotions are temporary, coming and going like waves. You'll dive deeper into this in the thought training section. For now, think of emotions as ocean waves—small, large, or even tsunami-sized. We can't predict their arrival, but we can do a few things.
Don't stay in the turbulent waters.
Ride the wave, go under, or move beyond the turbulent zone, but don't stay and struggle there.
Emotions can be triggered situationally, hormonally or emotionally. Sometimes we actually do ‘wake up on the wrong side of the bed’ and we are just in a place and cannot really figure out why. It is helpful to remind ourselves that we have been in this spot before and it did not last forever. Regardless of if we feel great or awful, it will not last. Emotions are temporary. They do not last. They are not factual. They are just emotions, here one moment and changed the next.
If we learn to ride the wave we are one step closer to not allowing our emotions to dictate our behaviors, choices or actions. There are a lot of phrases out there to remind us that emotions are not to be in charge of us. William Glasser, the creator of Reality Therapy used the visual that we are a car, and we are meant to be front wheel drive. The rear wheels are awesome because they have a lot of power, but it sucks in rain, snow and rough conditions. Life IS rain, snow and rough conditions and if we drive in rear wheel drive we will lose control. You guessed it, the rear wheels are emotions and physiology (how our body feels). The front wheels are thoughts and choice. Not as powerful but much more stable and controllable.
If your not a car person you can always go with the phrase that emotions make good consultants but bad CEOs. You really don’t want them making the choices in your life. So learn to ride the waves of emotions and remember they are in and out and do not stay.
THIS IS TEMPORARY
Don't judge your emotions. See them, acknowledge them, and avoid shaming yourself. Recognize their purpose, understand that it's just a part of you feeling this way for now, and know it won't last forever. You'll find more about this in the Thought Skills section.
You notice that the skilled folks learn quickly and know when to ride over the top of an incoming wave and when to dive under it. You have to learn that you cannot tough your way through it but rather have to learn to make it pass over or under you in order to make your life a whole lot easier.
CHECK IN WITH THOUGHTS AND BODY
This website has tabs for Body Skills and Thought Skills. These two areas teach us how to manage our body’s reactions to anxiety and how to counter the Thoughts that bring about anxiety as well as come about as a byproduct to anxiety. Our body responds to anxiety, as we've discussed before. Return to top
Emotions are driven by our perceptions of the world, which are driven by our core beliefs. Our perceptions of the world in turn drive our thoughts which greatly influence our emotions and vice versa. Thoughts, feelings and physiology (our body’s response) tightly interplay. Learning emotional regulation requires approaching emotions from all angles.
Thoughts are connected to emotional states. Emotions influence how we think and how our bodies respond. Finally, we have behavioral responses to our emotions, like running away, escaping or procrastinating. Sometimes this is helpful and sometimes it is maladaptive. Click here to go to worksheet
It is vital to learn to recognize our emotions in our bodies and minds and observe them, their intended purpose as well as our previous responses to our emotions that were functional and ones that may have been maladaptive. Return to top
OBSERVATION
Sometimes we just need to be seen
We all usually have thoughts, feelings, and urges when things happen around us. When we start feeling emotions, we often criticize ourselves for them, which makes them even stronger. Sometimes I feel foolish for thinking this way.
This makes us feel even worse and makes our emotions stronger. But it's okay and natural to feel what we do. If we decide to just observe our feelings without being hard on ourselves, we can see them as normal and move forward. Learning to observe and experience an emotion helps us move forward instead of making it worse by trying to control it. This means we can understand and react in a better way. Return to top
Don't Control Me
Often, we tell ourselves that if we can control our emotions, we would feel better. The reality is that how we feel is just what it is. We can observe it, acknowledge it, realize it is a temporary state and you do have control as to how you react to it.
For example, I see an ex. I feel anxious and angry and humiliated. I observe the emotions and acknowledge that these are all valid and
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I feel them.
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I have control over how I react.
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I can run and hide.
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I can yell and scream.
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I can walk past like I am oblivious.
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I can say hello.
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I can pray I turn invisible.
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I can distract myself in conversation with someone else.
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Regardless, my feelings are a reflection of my past interactions with my ex, our past interactions and a signal I need to work through a bit more when the time is right and I am alone. I note this, observe it, don’t judge myself for the emotional response, opt for a socially appropriate choice and go on with my day.
Don’t be so mean to me
During times of depression or anxiety, our thoughts and inner criticisms may turn harsh and negative. Instead of immediately passing judgment, we can work on simply observing our thoughts. By practicing this, we open the door to understanding what our emotions are trying to communicate. This understanding enables us to react in a positive and helpful way, turning our responses into something productive and constructive.
In this case, more is better and more is less
The more I become focused on observing and not judging my emotions the better skilled I become with them.
The more I accept them as temporary states and internal signals the better I become with them.
The more I allow them to surface, the less powerful and overwhelming they become.
Like boiling water without a lid, the heat bubbles to the surface and dissipates, but kept inside a tea kettle with no open escape, pressure builds until it screams out the tiny valve alerting us that no more pressure can be contained. So too is the pressure of our emotions. The water will boil regardless, we must provide the outlet so it does not scream out. Return to top
Arrogance is Shame on High Volume
Perfectionism is Shame in Shiny Form
Procrastination is Shame in a Turtle Shell
Not the Giant of my dreams not the dwarf of my fears
Ever wonder how sometimes someone can be so arrogant and then at others so insecure? Its because arrogance is insecurity’s mask. A confident person is never arrogant.
Confidence is a quiet thing. Arrogance is the effort to make oneself seem big so that others cannot get close enough to realize how small you are on the inside.
There is an old poem that has the line in it “not the giant of my dreams nor the dwarf of my fears”. The meaning is that I am not as grand as I desire, or pretend. I am also not as worthless and little or insignificant as I fear or believe. I am somewhere in between. I am parts of a whole, with little parts and big parts, strengths and weaknesses, all coming together to make me.
Self-acceptance is a process of accepting the weaknesses and strengths as part of the entire package and embracing this as who we are, all our parts. Each part serves a purpose. When we shame ourselves for our weaknesses and begin to hide these parts of ourselves from others, then they become more shameful and secretive and we begin to fear others will see them.
However, if I embrace my areas of perceived flaws and do not shame myself for them, then I can integrate this into my overall self-image. I suck at math…and directional awareness…and penmanship, spelling and and and. But I am really skilled in other areas. I was so bad with spelling as a child that I made my penmanship worse so I would not be humiliated when asked to write on the board. Since no one could read it they could not make fun of me for my spelling.
However, then typewriters and word processors became a thing, but before spell check was a thing and my secret was out. I was an excellent typist so it came to the moment, own that I could not spell words like weird or is it wierd or pretend like I could not type well and they were just typos.
I learned that being bad at certain things did not make me bad. Although spelling is a safe and small example, many of us run from so many things that we try to keep secrets from the world because we fear judgment. Oftentimes, the judgment is not coming. Of course I am providing a safe sample, and most of us deal with real and debilitating shame of things that make us feel as if we are real failures, and unforgivable, and never enough. The dwarf of our fears is a true terror film. This even keeps us from attaching to others (see the attachment section for this). Brene Brown does an excellent job discussing shame for additional resources. But addressing our shame and working towards self acceptance is a huge part of reducing our anxiety internally and our social anxiety.
A humble person has nothing to fear, but a prideful man will always be running.
This means that the person who humbly owns all of their parts, failures and successes is transparent and fears no secrets. But the prideful person pretending to not have flaws runs in fear of being found out for who they really are.
Perfectionism is shame as well. Having to be perfect is another way of trying to be the giant of our dreams. To be so great that no one can see any flaws. And if we cannot be 100% perfect, then we will 100% not be. Some people shift between perfectionism and procrastination because it can be exhausting to hold up the mask of perfectionism for so long.
Countering perfectionism is really about battling shame and recognizing that you are enough and that your acceptance CANNOT be performance based. That's right, love and acceptance cannot be performance based. That is a concept that is difficult to grasp for many people. It does not mean that others must love us regardless of what we do. If you are a jerk, people will not like you. That's pretty simple. Your character must be likable. But performance based behaviors are different than character. Character is in the realm of do you see, hear and value the other human, are you compassionate etc. Again, don't get rigid with the thinking but apply the basic principals of relational versus performance based. Return to top
It's Not My Vomit
This catchy phrase is a good phrase to remember when we examine what is our emotional baggage compared to that of others.
In the sense of ‘it’s not my vomit’ please imagine (but not too graphically) that you are in a room with someone and they are ill, and they vomit on you. This is disgusting. You leave the room and walk into a busy hallway and people look at you and make the assumption that you are ill and have vomited on yourself. It is an understandable assumption. You look disgusting, you smell disgusting, and you have vomit all down the front side of you. People then react to you as if you are contagious, sick, gross etc. However, you are carrying the byproduct of someone else’s sickness. It is not yours.
This happens to us emotionally far more often than most of us realize. We receive the emotional vomit of another person yet it leaves a residue on us and this is then seen by others in our anxiety, depression, low sense of self, how we react and respond to others etc. They then react and respond to this and our additional interactions and thus alter them. It sets off a chain reaction.
When physically someone vomits on us, it is imperative that we take off those clothes, shower, put on clean clothes and move on with our day. Most of us would also process this out as well and talk about how gross it was, and why didn’t they direct their vomit to a toilet like a responsible person. We need to do the same thing when someone emotionally vomits on us. We process this out, and get the residue off of us, remove their projection of their emotional vomit off of us, sort out their stuff from ours and move forward. Return to top