Finding agency in anxiety 

Anxiety is the focus of this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week. Baptist minister Shaun Lambert explains why mindfulness - our capacity for attention and awareness - can help, and how it relates to the Christian faith

 



Anxiety is a bit like attention, everyone knows what it is until they are asked to define it. For me it is like a sense of dread creeping over me which comes with anxious thoughts about what people are thinking or that something catastrophic is going to happen. It can appear with physical symptoms like a raised heartbeat or breathing too quickly. I am often overwhelmed by it and feel I have no control over the anxiety or events (a loss of agency). Because of its prevalence in our society, anxiety is the focus of this year’s Mental Health Awareness Week (15-21 May) run by the Mental Health Foundation.
 
There will be a lot of helpful information offered this week about anxiety. Raising awareness is important because sometimes we don’t know what we are experiencing is anxiety. One of the ways we regulate our difficult emotions is to avoid them. Naming a feeling, thought or physical sensation as a symptom of anxiety can be very helpful. I have had anxiety since I was a child, but I didn’t realise it until 2006 when I became very stressed, anxious, and close to burnout. It was only as part of my counselling training that I learnt to put a name to what I was feeling.
 
What also helped me was mindfulness. There are many myths about mindfulness and so sometimes Christians avoid mindfulness therapies that could help with anxiety. I still get Christians who tell me they suffer from anxiety or depression, their doctor has advised them to try mindfulness but someone in their church has said, ‘Don’t touch it with a barge pole, it’s Buddhist.’
 
The most important question to ask is, ‘what is the origin of mindfulness?’ Mindfulness itself is the universal human capacity for attention and awareness.[1]  That means God is the origin of mindfulness – we have been created with attentional capacities. That is why every faith tradition has some form of mindfulness, because they all work with attention and awareness. It is secular psychology that is late to the party. Having said that secular mindfulness has created a sophisticated mind-body map of those capacities.
 
Another misunderstanding about mindfulness is that it is just formal meditations. Mindful awareness practices are helpful but are only one strand within the overall benefits of mindfulness. Formal meditative practices are not for everyone at every stage of their life. Sometimes people need more than mindfulness. It is important that any help you get from a mindfulness teacher is trauma-sensitive help.[2] Your first port of call if you have a mental health condition and you are thinking about using mindfulness is to ask your doctor for advice. I want to take one aspect of mindfulness that is not usually highlighted and that is how understanding it at a big picture level can help, especially its sophisticated mind-body map of our attentional capacities.
 
This big picture oversight is called metacognition. In Robert Eaglestone’s book Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students he argues that in studying English it is helpful to explain to students ‘why English is taught and studied the way it is.’[3] Not only is metacognition which he defines as ‘knowing what you are doing and why’ helpful in education it is helpful in our mental health.[4] This gives us some agency in dealing with our mental health. Particularly important is knowing about our attentional and mindful capacities with which we can regain a sense of control.
 
Mindfulness theory operates at a metacognitive level. For example, the idea that I am not my thoughts and feelings, that I am bigger than my thoughts and feelings, that thoughts are not facts is a metacognitive proposition. It is a helpful idea but means nothing until it becomes a metacognitive insight: until it moves into lived realisation. I used to think I was an anxious person. I spent a long time reflecting on this proposition that I wasn’t my thoughts and then suddenly I had the insight I needed: I wasn’t an anxious person, I just had anxious thoughts. This was a very important shift in perspective for me. It enabled me to relativise my anxious thoughts. This is how we can, in Paul’s words, ‘take captive every thought’ (2 Corinthians 10:5), by observing them and relativising them.
 
Another way of describing this process of observing our thoughts is to say that we are exercising the mindful capacity of self-awareness. That capacity to observe or witness our thoughts, feelings and bodily sensation is meta-awareness. One part of our mind can notice that another part of our mind has wandered to anxious preoccupation. We cannot change anything unless we are aware of it. Once we exercise self-awareness, we can then self-regulate the difficult emotion – notice it and let it go. We can in mindfulness language exercise self-transcendence – we can transcend our anxious self-focus.[5]
 
I have mentioned our ability to observe our thoughts and feelings or witness them. This can be approached from another theoretical angle. We are story-telling creatures – we have a narrative self. Many of the stories we tell ourselves are distorted or negative. We have a negativity bias. Some people think up to 80 per cent of our thoughts are negative. This is our default position. So, when Paul tells us to intentionally pay attention to ‘whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is pure…’ (Philippians 4:8) this is a wise spiritual and mental health exercise. In our narrative self we are living in our heads.
 
At a big picture level mindfulness talks not only about our narrative self, but our experiential self – when we are living in our bodies, senses, and breath rather than our heads. In our head we can be at any point of time, involved in mental time travel: ruminating about a past we cannot change or worrying about a future we cannot control. One way we can rest from anxiety, the virtual world and living in our heads is to find simple, natural ways to move into our bodies for a while. It might be making a cup of tea, taking a little walk, stretching, doing some gardening. Many find paying attention to their breathing can help, others find this unhelpful. The reason stepping into our experiential self can help us is that the body, senses, and breath are always in the present moment – they cannot be at any other point of time. The present moment is reality in its fullness.
 
I have mentioned our ability to observe our thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations – this can be called our observing self. Instead of being our thoughts and feelings we can observe or witness them. As the train of anxiety comes into the station of our mind, we can notice it and let it go, rather than go off on that train into further anxiety. Mindful awareness practices help us cultivate this observing self, this meta-awareness but we also need to understand what we are doing and why.[6]
 
Having recently completed a PhD on mindfulness of God at London School of Theology, alongside my training as a psychotherapist, I am also pursuing a training path for accreditation in teaching secular mindfulness. Much of what I do now is psycho-spiritual education using the idea of metacognition. I try to be open about my mental health struggles because others have told me it helped them to talk about their struggles or to seek help. One other idea that has helped me is not to see sadness and happiness on a continuum, and that I have to move toward the positive end to be happy. There is another idea which is that sadness and happiness are two poles within us that can co-exist together. Or anxiety can live alongside moments of peace. This is a helpful metacognitive thought.[7]

 
As you hold anxiety this week:
May the love of Christ take hold of you,
May the light of Christ shine in your heart,
May the love of Christ flow through you like a river.
 
As you are compassionate to others who are struggling this week, pray this for them:
May the love of Christ take hold of them,
May the light of Christ shine in their heart,
May the love of Christ flow through them like a river.


Image | Suzy Hazelwood | Pexels
 

Shaun Lambert is a writer, psychotherapist, Baptist Minister and Honorary Mindfulness Chaplain for Scargill Movement

 

[1] Williams and Kabat-Zinn, “Mindfulness: Diverse Perspectives on its Meaning,” 15.
[2] For a good introduction to this see David A. Treleaven’s Trauma-Sensitive Mindfulness: Practices for Safe and Transformative Healing (New York, London: W.W. Norton & Co, 2018).
[3] Robert Eaglestone, Doing English: A Guide for Literature Students 4th edition (London: Routledge, 2017), Kindle location 228.
[4][4][4] Eaglestone, location 228.
[5] For an introduction to our mindful capacities of self-awareness, self-regulation, and self-transcendence see David, R. Vago, and David A. Silbersweig, "Self-Awareness, Self-Regulation, and Self-Transcendence (S-ART): A Framework for Understanding the Neurobiological Mechanisms of Mindfulness," Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6 (2012):1-30.
[6] See the same article by Vago for the theory of narrative, experiential and observing selves.
[7] See the Bradburn Scale of Wellbeing (Affect Balance Scale).


 

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