Managing Economic Anxiety: Facing the Downturn Calmly While Soaking in a Bath
Is there anyone left untouched by the recession? With the constant deluge of bad unemployment numbers, bail-out news, round after round of lay offs and the dwindling of everyone’s retirement accounts, the entire nation (and indeed the world) has become one giant mass of anxiety. We see anecdotal evidence of the physical manifestations of stress and worry all around us (and in us!)—headaches, stomach pain, fatigue and sleeplessness, depression, anxiety, and lowered immunity allowing for the annual winter flu to take hold. One of the few consolations is that everyone is in the same boat.
It’s easy to become frozen by fear in such an environment. As Gregory Berns, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Center for Neuropolicy at Emory University, wrote in the December 6 “Preoccupations” column of the New York Times, “We are caught in a spiral in which we are so scared of losing our jobs, or our savings, that fear overtakes our brains. And while fear is a deep-seated and adaptive evolutionary drive for self-preservation, it makes it impossible to concentrate on anything but saving our skin…Ultimately, no good can come from this type of decision-making.” Dr. Berns describes an experiment he and colleagues performed in which volunteer subjects were subjected to a small but unpleasant shock. He reports that when people became conditioned to expect the shock, the parts of the brain that process pain became active even before the shock arrived. Many of us are living now in a similar reality, wincing when we turn on the TV news or open the morning paper, afraid to even know how much worse things have become since yesterday.
The fact is, things are tough right now. The fear is that is will get worse. It is important to take control of your anxiety level, first by paying attention to those tell-tale signs of fear and worry in your body, and when you notice them, acting immediately to calm yourself. Anxiety can arise in response to a real threat—you actually do lose your job, or your savings all but vanish on a bad market day—but often it arises even when we are not directly threatened. Our minds are trapped in a vicious cycle of worry.
FEAR stands for Future Events Appearing Real and our bodies and minds can’t tell the difference between what actually happens and what we think might happen (like Dr. Bern’s’ shock experiment).Stress can come from any situation or THOUGHT that makes you feel frustrated, angry, nervous or even anxious. Survey findings show that added holiday stress, on top of already high stress levels, makes it hard to cope. This increases the likelihood that people will turn to unhealthy behaviors like over-eating or drinking alcohol to deal with all the stress and worry. Obviously this is not healthy, and can have an impact on our immediate and long-term health.
If you’re feeling anxious, instead of reaching for a martini or stuffing your face with cookies, remember a bath can provide the calming atmosphere you need in order to banish fear and return your emotions to a healthy balance. Baths put you fully in the present moment, as you focus on the warm comforting water, become aware of your breath, and just soak. And although high stress may once have sent you sprinting for the spa, baths are an inexpensive alternative, don’t require much time, and you can enjoy the benefits of a bath right at home. From the perspective of relaxed calm and well-being a bath induces, you can make clearer decisions about how endangered your job or finances really are, and if action is truly called for, you can make your decisions based on facts and not fear.
