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本文全文摘选自Readers Digest USA-2021-10，适合改编为高考“阅读理解C篇, 或七选五”，可供高中英语学习交流使用。
Overlapping crises have made many of us jumpy. But how do you know when you have slipped into a more serious problem and need help? 相互重叠的危机让我们许多人心惊肉跳。但是，你怎么知道什么时候你陷入了更严重的问题，需要帮助呢?
Quieting Anxiety
减轻焦虑
by rebecca philps
Five years ago, Meredith Arthur, a 45-year-old San Francisco resident and an employee of the social media company Pinterest, arrived at a neurologist appointment in a distraught state. She spoke a mile a minute, rattling through her extensive research on the vagus cranial nerve and explaining why she thought it might hold clues to her crippling shoulder and neck pain, frequent dizziness, nausea, and chronic migraines. “I was presenting my inexpert case to an expert, who stopped me and said, ‘I know what’s wrong. You have generalized anxiety disorder.’”
For Arthur, the diagnosis was a shock. She had been so focused on her debilitating physical symptoms that she hadn’t considered that they could be linked to her mental health. Almost immediately, it clicked.
“My brain was always in overdrive,” Arthur recalls. “I wanted to work all the time and solve everything.”
She would never have described herself as a worrier, however, and certainly didn’t connect her perfectionismto anxiety or its effect on her body. But, in fact, physical discomfort — not distressing thoughts — is most often what drives people with anxiety to seek treatment.
“The diagnosis changed everything,” says Arthur. “It’s like somebody picked me up off the earth, turned me around 180 degrees, and put me back down. It was the same world, but everything looked a little different.”
Arthur is one of the 40 million American adults who experience an anxiety disorder — the most common form of mental illness — every year. But anxiety touches everyone to varying degrees. Typically, it’s intermittent and brought on by a stressful or traumatic event. Its core features are excessive fear and worry, and one of the major underlying factors is a feeling of uncertainty about situations that occur in daily life.
These are exceedingly uncertain times due to the combination of economic precariousness, social unrest, environmental catastrophes, and the COVID-19 pandemic. Managing anxiety will ensure it doesn’t rule your life.
How Chronic Anxiety Harms the Body
Anxiety is part of your body’s stress-response system, and it can be uncomfortable, overwhelming, and sometimes plain confusing.
“I describe anxiety as a future-oriented emotional response to a perceived threat,” says Joel Minden, PhD, a clinical psychologist and the author ofShow Your Anxiety Who’s Boss. “We anticipate that something bad will happen. Maybe we have evidence. Maybe we don’t. But we have a belief that something catastrophic might occur.”
Almost immediately, Minden says, your sympathetic nervous system, which controls involuntary processes such as breathing and heart rate, kicks into high gear. This leads your adrenal glands to release adrenaline and cortisol, two of the crucial hormones that drive your body’s fight-freeze-flight response and prompt anxiety’s physical symptoms. Your heart races, your blood pressure rises, your pupils dilate, you get short of breath, and you break out in a clammy sweat.
Meanwhile, cortisol curbs functions that your brain considers nonessential: It alters immune system responses and suppresses the digestive system, the reproductive system, and growth processes. This was helpful for our ancestors trying to outrun saber-toothed tigers but is not so much when you can’t stop ruminating about whether you might have caught COVID-19 when the guy behind you in line at the grocery store coughed.
For Arthur, chronic physical pain and discomfort were the most powerful manifestations of her disorder, but anxiety can show itself in many ways. You might perceive something as threatening even when it isn’t or go to great lengths to avoid uncomfortable situations. You might constantly overthink plans or spend all of your time creating solutions to worst-case scenarios. Maybe you feel indecisive and fear making the wrong decision. Or you might find yourself restless, keyed up, and unable to relax.
Often, those symptoms last only as long as certain situations are present. (You may feel nervous about flying, but you do it and the feeling fades when the wheels touch down.) Other times, anxiety can tip into becoming a chronic anxiety disorder such as generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, social anxiety disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, posttraumatic stress disorder, or a phobia.
The distinction between circumstantial or temporary anxiety and a more severe case isn’t always easy to make, says clinical psychologist David Carbonell, PhD, founder of the Anxiety Treatment Center in Chicago.
“There isn’t a blood test for anxiety. At some point, everybody experiences it,” he says. “It becomes a disorder when it interferes with your behavioral choices and your ability to do as you wish in life.”
That point could be when your job requires you to fly but you’re too anxious to make it even as far as the airport, which ultimately puts your livelihood in jeopardy. More generally, you may find that anxious feelings last even after a problem has been resolved and that those feelings seem to arise from one situation to the next without relief.
Treat Anxious Feelings
When They Persist Despite the fact that chronic anxiety is very manageable with some combination of medication, therapy, and lifestyle adjustments, only about 37 percent of affected people receive treatment of any kind. The rest try to battle their anxiety from within or suppress it.
“People spend too much time and effort trying to control anxiety,” says Minden. “I encourage them to remember that anxiety is a normal emotional response.” If you try to banish it, he adds, all you’re doing is putting it more at the forefront of your mind.
Here are some tips to help minimize anxiety’s negative effects:
1. Accept it
If you accept anxiety as part of life and part of everyone’s lived experience, you can learn to relate to it with self-compassion and even with humor. This is a cornerstone of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), which has been gaining clinical validation, including by the American Psychological Association.
ACT guides people to see their unpleasant emotions as just feelings and to accept that parts of life are hard. Practitioners encourage patients to begin a dialogue with anxious thoughts, examining the causes of those feelings while also keeping in mind their personal goals and values. Although anxious thoughts shouldn’t be completely suppressed, sufferers can be trained to not allow anxiety to turn them away from what they want to do and who they want to be.
2. Be curious about it
Along with acceptance, a mindfulness approach to anxiety can be useful, especially when you’re cycling through anxious thoughts and unable to think clearly or rationally.
In his bookUnwinding Anxiety, psychiatrist and neuroscientist Judson Brewer, MD, recommends paying attention to the body sensations, thoughts, and emotions that come as a result of feeling anxious or worried. When we notice and name the physical sensations that are arising in our bodies (my face feels flushed; my breathing is shallow; my heart is beating quickly), we are already less caught up in those anxious reactions, simply through that act of observation, writes Dr. Brewer.
Many mindfulness training apps can help, including one, also called Unwinding Anxiety, that Dr. Brewer developed in his lab at Brown University. After three months of using the app, test participants reported an average 57 percent reduction in their anxiety.
Understanding exactly what was happening inside her body and bringing her awareness to it was a great tool for Arthur because her “thinking brain” could then take over from her immediate fight-freeze-flight reaction to an anxious moment. Over time, her symptoms became less acute and troublesome. She pictured the hormones hitting her body the same way an ocean wave hits the beach. The beach can’t fight the wave, but it remains steady and allows the wave to wash over it and fall back.
3. Make lifestyle adjustments
Learning to live with anxiety is an individual process that requires trial and error to get just right. While acceptance is the first and most important step, some lifestyle changes have been proved to take the edge off as well.
Since fatigue and increased stress leave us more vulnerable to anxiety, a well-balanced diet, adequate rest, and, above all, exercise can help us manage it better. One research study showed that regular vigorous workouts reduced the likelihood of developing an anxiety disorder over the next five years by 25 percent.
Meredith Arthur’s tool kit consists of medication — a prescription SSRI antidepressant (see sidebar below) — and a consistent meditation practice.
Arthur also shares her experiences on the website medium.com. Openly discussing her anxiety has transformed her relationship with it. “I’m learning to live in harmony, as much as possible, with this thing that is a part of me,” she says. “It’s not always pleasant, but I accept and, to the extent that I can, take care of my anxiety.”(1527 words)
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