Stop Anxiety In Its Tracks

By Xolani Kacela

Stop Anxiety In Its Tracks: 22 Hacks to Destress, Avoid Negativity, and Stop Overthinking tackles America's #1 mental health crisis by helping readers make sense of their anxiety while providing them innovative strategies that boosts their ability to cope and manage Covid-era stress and worry.

This book captivates the

• Language: English
• Publisher: X to the k Publishing
• Release date: Jul 3, 2023
• ISBN: 9781088133590

Xolani Kacela

Raised by an atheist father and a deeply religious mother, Reverend Xolani Kacela began early seeing the world through a lens of many faiths and beliefs. His broad experience helps him appeal to a wide audience, both secular and religious. He serves as minister of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Las Cruces, NM, and has been minister at four other Unitarian Universalist churches as well as the United Methodist Church. He grew up a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME). As Chaplain in the U.S. Air Force and Air National Guard, he served in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, as well as in Guam and Iraq. He holds a Ph.D. in Pastoral Theology and Pastoral Counseling from Brite Divinity School. His many publications on spirituality, faith development, grief, and relationships include articles, “Being One with the Spirit: Mysticism of Howard Thurman,” “One Session is Enough: Counseling African American Families,” and “Mature Religious Experience in the Midst of Death and Dying”; his book chapters include “To Wake, To Rise: Meditations on Justice and Resilience” and “Art and Wholeness in Church Life.”  His blog, masteringyourownfaith.com with an audience of thousands, explores issues ranging from maximizing one’s potential to race and politics. He contributes to NPR and community radio in Las Cruces, NM, and newspapers and radio in the Southwest.  He believes that everyone has the foundations for living a great life, using their own faith convictions as the cornerstone.

Book preview

Introduction

Picture in your mind’s eye a woman, Susan, who is a nice and hard-working person. Susan might be working too hard. Susan is worried about getting all the things she needs done today before she runs out of time. She wakes up with her mind moving 100 miles per hour as she completes her mental to-do list. She has a habit of doing things as she thinks of them, but sometimes gets distracted in the middle of a task and forgets her intention midstream.

Sometimes Susan gets text messages or phone calls from her work at odd hours and doesn't know whether to answer them immediately or wait until the workday begins. She gets upset, wondering what is expected of her. She has started avoiding looking at her phone for fear of being asked to do something during the precious off hours that she reserves for herself. Her friends and family text her, but often she doesn't see the texts because she's so stressed about the possibility of an incoming work text.

On top of all that, her 25-year-old son has picked up the habit of calling to ask for money, which further stresses her out. She promised herself she wouldn’t enable his unhealthy habits by taking his calls or entertaining his stories, which sometimes sound made-up. Still, she wants a good relationship with her son and would like to stay in contact with him on a semi-regular basis. Her constant worry about him—and about how to deal with him—tacks on another level of stress for her.

These days, she constantly arrives late to important meetings and sometimes misses meetings altogether. Her boss has encouraged her to keep her meetings on her cell phone calendar, but she often forgets. Then, when she does put it on the calendar, she’s not in the habit of checking to see what meetings she’s scheduled.

Part of her stress is tied to all the online accounts that she has, each of which has its own login and password. Susan yearns for the days when she could get by with a single password for her e-mail, but now, with 30-plus accounts, she can rarely remember any of them. She is afraid to write them down for fear that someone will find her list and hack into her accounts.

When her stress gets terrible, she doesn't feel like doing basic tasks, such as going to the grocery store. That would mean creating another list so she can remember what she needs to buy. She has occasionally gone to the store without her grocery list only to get home and remember something important she forgot.

She also has a secret. She has put off going to the doctor for a long time because she is afraid of what she’ll learn. Her mother died at a relatively young age, and she is approaching that same age. She knows she should get checked out, but she can’t bring herself to do it.

She feels like her stress level is strangling the life out of her. She desperately wants to get a hold of her life so she can feel more control of day-to-day living. All the stress has caused a mountain of anxiety for her.

Does any of this sound familiar?

You know that stress and anxiety have taken over your life if:

You feel nervousness and even strain in your body

You often forget what you started within a few minutes time

You feel overwhelmed the moment you wake up in the morning

Your to-do list is long, and you rarely seem to get through it

You avoid listening to voicemail for fear of someone asking you to do something or receiving unwelcome news

You don’t feel relaxed on your days off from work

You are constantly checking email when you’re supposed to be with your family and/or friends

You have trouble falling asleep

Negative thoughts prevail where there used to be positive thinking

You’re unaware of how your thoughts affect your actions

You find yourself overthinking an issue, but not actually solving problems

You crave more peace and joy in your life

Stress lives on the surface of your life, but the underlying problem is often anxiety. One sure way to get a handle on out-of-control stress and anxiety is to take a comprehensive picture of your life and analyze what's really affecting you from the outside and what is going on inside of you. This book will help you understand what you’re feeling and show you how to lessen both stress and its toxic enabler, anxiety.

Admitting that anxiety is a dominant force in your life helps you gain control over it. Taking that first step toward managing anxiety is the right thing to do to restore wholeness and to become more mindful.

Avoiding Added Anxiety

Living every day is stressful and worrisome. There is stress from your job, child-rearing, caring for your health and wellness, political divisiveness, environmental concerns, bills to pay, being overworked and underpaid, pressures to go to church and/or spend time with your family and friends, the constant inflow of e-mail and voice mails and text messages that must be answered, nosy neighbors, inflation, the rising price of gas, and your rude coworker who is constantly saying politically incorrect things. (I feel my stress mounting just listing these things!) You may not be able to do anything about the existence of those stressors, but you can change how you navigate and manage them.

As a taste of what’s to come in this book, right here in the Introduction, I’m going to help you identify and avoid some key added sources of anxiety that none of us need:

FEAR – False Evidence Appearing Real

The world can be a scary place. Crime and violence plague many communities, and wars and civil unrest scattered across the globe. Here in America, mass shootings have taken on a life of their own. We have many well-placed fears.

But there are fake fears, too. We call that fear False Evidence Appearing Real. That fear is the apprehension you feel when you psyche yourself out of real-life opportunities. Say there’s a job opening for a position you longed to move into. But instead of applying for the job, you get into negative self-talk. They don’t want someone my age. They’re probably looking for a person with more experience than I have. Or I’m not good at interviewing.

These so-called reasons for not applying are fear-based excuses. Each one is false evidence conjured in your mind. It is not verified or based on any real feedback. It is false evidence appearing real that will cause you not to apply for the job. You are probably imminently qualified to handle the job’s duties and responsibilities, but your fear can talk you out of it. We create F.E.A.R. with our very vivid imaginations. But we can shut that imagination down, and move forward confidently, even tentatively, but forward, nonetheless.

Scenario-Building

Have you ever found yourself anticipating an upcoming meeting with your boss or employee or a difficult conversation with a family member or friend? During the run-up to that conversation, you probably played in your mind over and over several versions of what would happen. That is called scenario-building.

The important thing to know about scenario-building is that 99% of the scenarios we build in our mind never happen. But that knowledge alone won’t stop you from having those conversations in your mind beforehand.

When you scenario-build, you are reinforcing stress and worry without knowing it. You may feel you’re rehearsing what you’ll say or do when the time comes, but mostly you are creating more anxiety. This is how your mind tricks you into worrying. You may feel you’re preparing brilliant comebacks to another person’s slights, but in reality, you’re gaining little advantage over them. Try to cultivate a mindful approach, taking each situation as it actually unfolds, holding fast to your values but not over-thinking. (We’ll get into this more in Chapter 2!)

Taking On Other People’s Anxiety

Because we are social creatures, we constantly scan spaces around us, looking for clues on how to act and behave. Humans are hard-wired to live in social groupings, and therefore, other people send us clues about what is acceptable within our group. When we see someone act in a certain way, our hard wiring guides our response.

You can see this visibly with babies, who look for their parents and other caregivers to give them clues on how to respond. They pick up on facial features, hand gestures, vocal cues, and other unspoken language as they figure out how to communicate. As adults, we continue this process. When you see someone who is happy, that person's positive emotions transmit, and you feel the effects immediately. If a person smiles at you, you are likely to return the favor and smile back at them. Often, this happens unconsciously.

The same process takes place with anxiety and the underlying emotions of fear and worry. When someone in your immediate circle of proximity