Prisoners of Anxiety

Prisoners of anxiety are usually wrongly incarcerated. Theyre behind bars because their unconscious mind is hyperactive. For example, some people tend to catastrophize when bad things happen in their lives. When an unfortunate thing occurs, they blow it out of proportion. In this case, they become prisoners held in what feels like an isolation chamber totally alone and depressed. Where other people might ˜˜feel bad about the unfortunate thing but quickly move on with their lives, these people feel just terrible and hunker down, endlessly trying to figure out whats wrong.

Take Jay, a client of mine, for example. As a vice president of sales in one of the worlds largest high-tech companies, he is the paragon of catastrophizers. If he gets a good report from one of his sales forces, life is goodbut only for a few hours. When one little bad thing happens, he fears that it will happen in all parts of his life, for the rest of his life. If sales fall behind the forecast in one month, he assumes the company will go bankrupt. He looks at his kids and worries about their future. How will he send them to college? One little argument with his wife and he begins to think his marriage is falling apart.

Jay knows these responses are not rational, not grounded in reality. In his job, he knows from experience that there will be bad months from time to time. But when they come up, he cant stop himself from panicking.

Another client, Steve, is vice president of acquisitions for a large chain of drugstores. His teams job is to buy eligible independent stores to add to the chain. They target viable enterprises and ˜˜seduce their owners . Then they handhold them through the due-diligence process and the closing of the deal. Every so often Steves team is ready to take a potential buy to the finish line but the deal is rejected by his boss or a board member. Steve then feels an unusual level of anxiety that lasts for more than a week. ˜˜Its overwhelming, he says. ˜˜I feel so angry ! Im usually not even involved in the particular dealbut it just pushes my buttons . He may get out of jail when things start going well again, but he knows that, in effect, hes out on day passes : When the next bad thing comes along, itll be back in the clink for him.

Another example of hypersensitivity is my client Normas response to the various presentations she must make to her peers. Norma is a divisional president of a major player in the travel industry. She leads an organization of several thousand people. None of them knows of her plight, except for her executive vice president of Human Resources. That person got me involved in helping Norma with her problem.

I learned from our sessions that Norma worries probably a normal amount in advance of a presentation. However, when shes in front of the crowd presentingthats when the important symptoms of her problem occur. To the audience she sounds confident and clear. But she practically loses consciousness while up there. She trembles. She clenches her but tocks so tightly it practically changes her posture . ˜˜My hands shake so much I have to hold onto something to stabilize them, she says.

Like Jay and Steve, Norma knows that her response is uncalled-for. She is a prisoner of anxiety.

Getting to the bottom of Jays, Steves, and Normas hypersensitivity in our coaching sessions involved peeling back protective layers to get to the childhood origins of their anxiety.

Jay had to come to grips with the fear of being totally vulnerable. This was a childhood fear he had carried into adulthood .
In Steves case, the reaction to having his department overridden by senior management related to how in childhood his controlling grandmother, who reared him and his siblings, always seemed to step in to stop him from having fun. His grandmother was afraid of being blamed for being too carefree with the kids in her charge. She overcompensated. Steve still carried resentment over her last-minute intrusions into his plans.
As for Norma, her oversensitivity was linked to a piano recital when she froze in front of a large audience. She was twelve years old and the trauma affected her deeply.

When big events happen to them, kids automatically make long- term adjustments to their mental programming. Their brains conclude that a certain thing must not be repeated. Whenever something smells like a potential repeat, they react negatively.