Anxiety

Tonight I was on a horse page and they were talking about a horses anxiety. Anxiety actually works the same in humans and animals. Working with horses, they require you to learn about anxiety because your other option is risk dying😬.

There’s a great illustration that a trainer uses with rabbits. He says people come tell me that they take their horse trail riding and the horse will see one rabbit and be fine. Another rabbit fine. But when we see the 10th rabbit he all of a sudden blows up bucking and freaking out. Why is he doing this out of the blue when he already saw 9 rabbits?

The horseman’s name is Warwick Schiller and he talks about oh, you have a 10 rabbit horse🐰🏇. So you’re going down the trail and the horse sees a rabbit and it bothers him. You don’t really notice or you don’t think much of it because it’s just a rabbit. The horse though doesn’t ever relax from that one rabbit. You then come across the second. The second one now builds a little on the first because he never relaxed and “let go” of the first rabbit so now he’s got two. By the tenth rabbit, he’s over threshold because anxiety if not taken care of builds like a foundation.

When you have anxiety, anxiety is one of the only things I can think of that compounds unless you are proactive about getting it down. So when that horse sees the first rabbit and shows some anxiety, I can ignore it or I can notice and do something with my horse that reduces his anxiety back down so we again are at zero rabbits. I can see 10 rabbits that day and if I have been proactive, there will be no blow up because even though we saw the same ten rabbits, I brought his anxiety down immediately after each time so we kept starting at zero and not actually building them. 👌🏻

The same goes with you. If you deal with anxiety and are moving to panic attacks, one large reason for it is you are not clearing rabbits. You are only paying attention to your anxiety once you hit blow up OR you don’t have tools to get it down. Anxiety is something that you actually need tools to get down and you have to use them. You can’t just hope it will go away. It doesn’t work like that. It compounds.

So what can I do? First, realize that any time you have anxiety you actually aren’t thinking straight and your BIGGEST issue is the anxiety. It’s not what you are having anxiety about. I will say this again. Your biggest issue is the anxiety, NOT what you have anxiety about. So first deal with the anxiety.

I often will ask someone so what are you really afraid of? Most of the time it’s pretty simple. This week my anxiety’s anxiety was really about being afraid of someone else’s opinion of my life. It was showing up different but when I asked what really was the problem it was that.

I then have some options. This week with a friend I kept my phone ringer on all night so that they knew they could get a hold of me because I would hear my phone. They needed to know that if they needed someone, there was a guaranteed answer. I am good at being there for people in the middle of the night but only if I hear the phone. I usually leave it on silent so I promised I would leave it on. I’ve done this many times for different people. This was solution enough for them to get their anxiety down. They had a solution to a problem. I had an older brother who would hoard food, (he was adopted as a teenager and lived days without food before us). My parents filled the cupboard and refrigerator with food and my mom would make enough for an army. He was also told any time if he was still hungry, my mom would make him more food. It took a bit of time but he stopped hoarding food because he had a solution to his fear and lived with less fear.

You need to find the root and then ask yourself what solutions do I have and actually 👉🏻COME UP WITH A PLAN. 👈🏻When you have a plan you will see that your anxiety will drop. You now are on your way to deescalating instead of escalating. It’s either or though. It won’t just go away. You have to be proactive about it.