Anxiety is Not an Emotion

Did you know that anxiety is not an emotion? You may think you "feel" anxious, but in reality, you're sensing anxiety. Anxiety is a physiological reaction from the "fight or flight" function of the vagus nerve. It triggers the adrenals to release cortisol and adrenaline into your nervous system, setting off an alert to potential danger. You feel it in your solar plexus above your kidneys.

Anxiety's hormones aren’t usually signs of real danger, making anxiety "homeless." It is a moving target in search of a home, but always gets kicked out due to its bad behavior. Anxiety can never be satisfied, making it a close partner to perfectionism. Never happy, never good enough, never complete. Anxiety, perfectionism, criticism, and paranoia cause repeating neurological thought loops that entrench fear (false expectations appearing real). This leads to catastrophizing (seeing disaster around every corner) or magical thinking (belief that unrelated events are connected despite no evidence). These thought patterns result from anxiety, constantly searching for a place to reside, but no one wants to let them in permanently due to their disruptive nature.

Emotions, on the other hand, are our friends. Whether pleasant or unpleasant, they ask to be acknowledged and felt. When we acknowledge our emotions, they transmit messages necessary for both surviving and thriving. However, we often fail to acknowledge and accept our emotions, causing them to return and eventually get stuck in the body. This can create stiffness, pain, and inflammation in the muscles, organs, or entire body areas.

But there’s hope! There are practical things you can do, or rather undo, to create and sustain feelings of calm, peace, and confidence, which dissolve anxiety.

Three Anxiety-Calming Practices:

1. Cognitive Practice: Move Your To-Do List to a Success List

• Start with a sticky note pile and a pen or pencil.
• Set a timer for two minutes and write the first "to do" thing that comes to mind on a sticky note, then rip it off and set it aside. Continue until the timer goes off.
• Categorize these tasks into piles and put the top priority for each pile on top.
• Create a "success list" of no more than three items.
• When feeling overwhelmed, do this activity to calm your mind and create a sense of order.

2. Breathing and Awareness

• Become consciously aware of your breathing and whatever feeling you are experiencing in the moment.
• Make this a practice whenever you notice sensations of anxiety or obsessive thinking.
• This will calm your nervous system and replace danger signals with signals of well-being.
• In a real dangerous situation, this practice will help you stay clear-headed and calm.

3. Acceptance

• Tell yourself, “I accept that I am feeling this right now.”
• Acceptance is the thriving part of your nervous system that allows feelings of joy and brings inspiration.
• Accepting one feeling in the moment opens the horizon to other good things, helping you wave goodbye to anxiety.

In conclusion, anxiety is not an emotion, but instead a physiological response that you can calm. Using the aforementioned anxiety-calming practices will bring relief and a sense of freedom.

Thanks to Marie-Helene Pelletier for her insights on this topic from her book, The Resilience Plan.

For professional support, you can email me at marie@shiftworkplace.com to schedule a time to connect and talk.

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Redefining Leadership in the Mission-Driven Sector

Bio:
Dimple Dhabalia is the founder of Roots in the Clouds, a boutique consulting firm that uses storytelling to heal individual and organizational trauma. She is a writer, podcaster, coach, and facilitator with over 20 years of public service experience at the intersection of leadership, mindfulness, and storytelling.

Dimple's mission is to transform mission-driven sectors by building human-centered cultures that meet mission needs and create psychologically safe spaces of empathy, connection, well-being, and belonging for staff.

Links:
Email: hello@rootsintheclouds.com
Website: https://www.rootsintheclouds.com/
Instagram: www.instagram.com/dimpstory
Newsletter: dearhumanitarian.substack.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/dimpstory
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@dimpstory
Facebook: www.facebook.com/rootsintheclouds

Quotes:
"Organizations must create a duty of care that looks at the needs of the whole person."

Highlights:
Explore the importance of acknowledging and addressing organizational trauma, the impact of moral conflict, and the need for holistic, human-centered duties of care in organizations.

Childhood Incidents:
As a child, Dimple celebrated all holidays. One Easter, she found eggs in their garden, but a neighbor said they were for Christian children, and her father made her return them. In school, a classmate called her an "Indian giver" for changing her mind about giving a pencil, and the teacher's reaction made her feel out of place. At age seven, her dad was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, shifting family dynamics and making her mom the breadwinner, often requiring Dimple's help and causing her to miss time with friends.

Cultural Influences:
Dimple has always prioritized service before self, a value her hardworking mother also upheld. Before her mother's passing, she urged Dimple and her sister to prioritize self-care, prompting a significant shift in Dimple's approach. Today, she believes in service without sacrifice.

Dimple enjoyed Greece the most, where clear boundaries between life and work allowed her to serve healthily and maintain a social life. However, moving to Delhi led to overworking and losing her social balance.

Personality and Temperament:
Dimple's temperament is rooted in empathy, caring, and a desire to fight injustice. Over the years, she has incorporated self-care, curiosity over judgment, and an understanding that people's behaviors often have unseen complexities.

Cultural Epiphanies:
As a Brownie, Dimple's leader surprised the girls with breakfast at McDonald’s. Dimple's mom dressed her up while the other girls arrived in pajamas. This incident highlighted a cultural disconnect, but taught Dimple about different social norms.

What Brings Out the Best in Dimple?
Curiosity, connection, and empathy are Dimple's strengths. Curiosity drives her to understand others, empathy allows her to share their space, and connection helps explore stories and organizational trauma.

Soapbox Moment:
Dimple’s book, Tell Me My Story: Challenging the Narrative of Service Before Self, is available now. Listen to her podcasts, "Service Without Sacrifice" & "What Would Ted Lasso Do?" For more information, sign up for her newsletter, Dear Humanitarian.

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Using the Language of Virtues for Building Soul-Sustaining Work Decisions

Episode Highlights:
By practicing virtues and utilizing the “virtues progression,” we discover practical tools for creating happier and healthier workplaces.

Importance of Virtues in the Workplace:
I've seen the impact of practicing virtue at work across four careers and over 500 managerial students, coaching clients, and 100+ companies. One of the companies I worked with asked me to help a dysfunctional site improve communication. After introducing the concept of virtues with a personal story, and asking them to share stories about an obstacle they had overcome or something they were proud of, I coached them to identify the virtues in each other's stories. This exercise led to open, non-defensive discussions. A few months later, the workplace atmosphere had improved significantly, increasing customer satisfaction and prompting the company to replicate the approach.

Learning the Language of Virtues:
Virtues are developed through learning and through practice. Virtues are habits of character. Once practiced, they become characteristic of the person’s character. At the heart of the virtue approach is the idea of community. A person's character traits are not developed in isolation, but within and by the communities to which he or she belongs. What philosophers call “the moral life” becomes a matter of determining the kind of people we should be and attending to the development of character within our communities and ourselves. (The Spirit of Work: Timeless Wisdom, Current Realities, p. 35).

To develop my own practice of virtues, I have a virtues card deck. Every morning I pick a card from the deck, and focus on that virtue throughout day. At the end of the day, I reflect on how I applied the virtue to my work. To benefit from this idea, consider getting “The Virtues Project” card deck or “Virtues Cards” app.

Virtues Progression:
From my study of the Sacred Writings of the world religions, I discovered a virtues progression which has specific virtues as benchmarks and a guideline to solve problems. The progression is Love – Truth – Justice – Unity – Peace – Abundance. Every human relations rupture starts from a gap in one of these places in the virtues progression.

For a workplace issue, identify which virtue is missing and look backward in the progression to see what foundational virtue is required to experience it, then forward to know the next step. For example, if someone refuses to communicate, it might be due to a lack of safety (not feeling loved) or fear of repercussions (truth).

To ensure a decision is just, consider that these three justice quotients must be present during the decision-making process for all to benefit:

1. Seek diverse perspectives
2. Consult those most affected
3. Involve all stakeholders

How Virtues Affect People:
A story from Chapter 2 illustrates the power of recognizing virtues. In a high-security prison where my husband once worked as a psychologist, he was assigned to help a large, tattooed, explosive inmate with anger management. As an emotions management tool, my husband introduced the "sparkle technique," a reminder to defuse anger by looking right, smiling, and then looking left, and smiling again (physiologically creating conditions for virtue by calming the nervous system). The technique reduces anger by changing eye position and engaging the muscles used for smiling. Although skeptical, the inmate tried it, found it effective, and even taught it to others, reducing fights in the prison and improving interpersonal relationships. He returned to his program with my husband saying enthusiastically, “This sparkle sh** really works!”

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