Untangling Anxiety
I grew up on a farm in remote Montana with many sheep and cattle. I am about to tell you an intense story, but know everyone was safe and unharmed in the end. One day, I was helping my father round up sheep and we noticed a missing ewe. We trekked through the field until we found her - panicked and tangled in a barbed wire fence. The more she struggled, the tighter she wound herself. Funny how the word wound (past tense for “to wind,” meaning tangled in a twisted manner) and wound (tissue damage) are the same spelling. The more she kicked and struggled, the tighter the wire dug into her. We raced to her and thankfully she was not drastically cut, yet.
My job was to get her to stop struggling. Hugging her head and holding her legs, I told her “You’re ok, you’re ok, you’re ok.” I held her down to get her to stop moving which surely must have made her feel captured, a horror for any flight animal. As she realized she was not being hurt, she settled down and my dad was able to cut away the thorny wire. Pretty soon, she was free and unharmed. Unphased, she trotted back to her herd probably with a very strange story to tell.
Anxiety can entangle us in the barbed wire of thoughts and emotions. The more we force it, the sharper the feelings become. The tighter it squeezes, the more we endure the pain. We are scratched by the fear of not getting loose and the abrasion of frustration. The question “why does this hurt so much?” or “why did this happen?” is the tangled helplessness.
When strong emotions of anxiety hit, breathing and staying still is a way through. The more we push through the barbed wire with force, the deeper it cuts. But when we soften, the barbs lose their sharpness. This too shall pass. If someone is helping you through something, they can find ways to cut you free. But they can’t do that in the middle of intense struggle.
Learning emotional control in the face of intensity is something we learn with horses at North Star Equestrian Center. Horses are flight animals who bolt away from potential threats. Working with flight animals, we help them into a parasympathetic (calming) state. Here, curiosity is cultivated and the adventure of learning takes off. Through the horsemanship training exercises involving a round pen, we move horses into a new nervous system, cultivating curiosity and learning.
Yes, horses pick up our emotions. But, it is a misconception that horses will react to our fear and anxiety. On the contrary, they understand these emotions well. What they don’t understand is hiding emotions. I often tell the students to feel their feelings and then show the horse you're working on moving the fear or anxiety. You show the horse by breathing deeply into your toes. Riding horses is scary, show the horse your honest fear. Then show them you are moving through it and the horse will understand. To a flight animal, calming down is just as strong a signal as fight-and-flight.
The sympathetic nervous system (fight-or-flight) is a very energetically expensive system. Horses don’t camp out in the sympathetic system. They spend most of their time peacefully grazing. As humans, we internalize the anxious set-point, steadily taxing the nervous system and the cardiac, endocrine, digestive, and skeletal health. Our complex brains can keep us locked in the pattern of anxious thought. Horses are very good at moving on to the next thing, they don’t live in the fright pattern; they seek calm.
Calming down has to happen before understanding can cultivate. If we ripped the sheep from the fence, it would have torn her apart. Same goes for the anxious person. Breathing deeply invites the parasympathetic nervous system to slow down. Problem solving from the parasympathetic is easy whereas the sympathetic system is not designed for problem solving, but for problem spotting - it’s the alarm system.
That is not to say the sympathetic state is less important than the parasympathetic state. The sympathetic nervous system increases awareness. Anxiety is actually your best tool. Our gut feeling is a highly valid sensory response. We want to believe anxiety bells, not just write them off as a disorder. This allows for awareness. Invalidating anxiety by pathologizing it takes away our main tool.
Even with Generalized Anxiety Disorder, help must center on re-calibrating the anxiety. We want to hear the alarm, and use the parasympathetic to discern if this is a fire or did I just overcook bacon?
Learning to center through tough anxiety is a skill we cultivate by working with horses both on the ground and riding. Horses are amazing teachers. If you ever want to schedule a horse therapy lesson with me, visit North Star Equestrian Center.