Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 7 (Time to get help?)

Should I get help?

The real problems come when the episodes go beyond Acute or Chronic to being Severe or Non-stop. At that point, the human mind will often have that Fight or Flight response kick in.

In Flight, the person may try to run from the experience. Maybe they stay away from all people for unreasonable lengths of time. Perhaps their moods just drop into the darkest regions and refuse to budge. They may try alcohol, drugs, anything to distract themselves from the sudden feelings of isolation, fear, unrealness, disconnection, hopelessness, emptiness.

In Fight, the person may take it upon themselves to force a connection. Violent outbursts to provoke reactions from others might prove the connection is still there because "I did something that had a demonstrable effect on the people or world around me." Violence against myself might be an effort to seek connection through pain.

Or in the ultimate Fight AND Flight reaction, a person might decide to choose the Great Beyond as their new environment. If my reaction to the episode is so titanic, I might become the Titanic and slip permanently under the waves of hopelessness.

If you start having episodes like these, where you find yourself losing that connection to yourself or the rest of creation, a professional evaluation might be the ticket you need to come to grips with them. I shy away from simple on-line questionnaires because they are often skewed towards one interpretation of symptoms or another. A trained person can include more data than what you click Yes or No for.

If your episodes are getting debilitating, or your reactions are getting more extreme, I beg you to seek help. In many parts of the USA (especially my region of the Midwest), there is huge cultural resistance to getting psychological help. It is met with derision and negativity, as is the person seeking the help. Shoot, folks have been known to suffer alone simply because the pain and fear of being stigmatized as “crazy” is too much for them.

What you decide is your business, of course. But let me say in conclusion how I feel about it:

I’ve been called many things in my life designed to hurt me. People have formed opinions about me that were not based on how I really am. I have been threatened and bullied, emotionally abused and mentally manipulated. Screw ‘em.

My brain, my life. I don’t care whether others like it or not, I’ve got some issues and I’m going to get better. I’m not going to hide them under a rug or in a back room behind a locked door. I’m going to be better. I’m going to be okay. They won’t, because they enjoy judging and ridiculing others. I’m going to be the master of my issues; those folks who choose to ostracize me will remain the slaves of theirs.

Conclusion

I hope this helps folks understand my battle with the 4 Ds. No doubt other folks have different experiences with these mental and emotional nuisances.

If you know someone who struggles with these things, don’t worry. They aren’t contagious, and there’s no need to avoid them during their struggles. Maybe by reaching out to them you can help them retain a sense of connection. No need to remind them simply that they are merely having a Perception issue; that probably wouldn’t help. Dismissing what another person is experiencing may help you feel less uncomfortable but it doesn’t do a thing for them.

If you’re struggling with these things, please be honest about it. Just as with other folks dismissing your struggle, your dismissal won’t really help you find resolution. If it gets bad enough, consider a course of therapy (whether guided or on your own). If reaching out to a professional is the best course, whatever embarrassment you feel about it will soon be overshadowed by the pride you have in advocating for your own peace, your own wellness.

And try to remember that episodes come and go. Just when you think it’s all gone and will never come back, something might happen and it comes knocking on your door. But that’s okay. It’s just another life cycle, even as it’s frustrating and scary. As it starts, it will stop. As it stops, it will start. But in time, you too might get to that glorious point where you feel a sudden disconnection, shrug your shoulders, and go watch TV or go hang out with friends anyway. You’re going to be okay.

Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 6 (Gauging an episode)

How to gauge the phenomenon

I am overcoming this stuff gradually.

First, it helped that I got properly diagnosed. My psychologist listened to me explain the symptoms (not as symptoms, but as just a stream of feelings and thoughts about them), then began to rule things out. My family has a notable incidence of schizophrenia and dementia, so let’s just say that anytime I started feeling the connection slip I was 100 times worse off because I feared I was on a one-way trip down a long and unhappy slope.

Second, I am a Virgo. That means I need to understand the crap out of things. So I spent awhile researching these issues. Of course, since the primary issue I was fighting was anxiety-induced depression, these little disorders got put on the backburner for awhile. Not to mention that I had trouble keeping the differences between all the Ds straight for a long time.

Third, I am becoming more and more Mindful. That’s been such a blessing, but I will not proclaim it as a perfect path for everyone. All people have their own path to walk, and when problems arise they need to find the solutions for them. Mine may not work for you, and that’s cool. Try things, get help if you actually could use it, and I wish you peace.

As I’ve been more aware and informed, I’ve realized that I hardly notice the episodes anymore. I am aware they happen, but without the cascading distress they aren’t the paralyzing, maddening events they used to be.

Sometimes my music just doesn’t sound right (yes, my headphones are on correctly – I checked!), so I stop listening to music for a little while. Maybe I have trouble focusing on reading because I am suddenly aware that they are merely patterns of black ink on white paper instead of words with meaning. That’s cool; I’ll go play a video game.

And sometimes I get overwhelmed by sadness at being the last of my alien kind on this God-forsaken ball of rock. Then I text my beloved and let her know I’m feeling totally disconnected from the world (in this case, that means the universe of humanity) and am significantly bumming, at which point she texts back a kiss or a hug or an I Love You, and soon it matters less. No matter how disconnected I feel from my fellow humans, I know they are ready to help me remember: we’re still united.

Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 5 (Dealing with an episode)

What to do when I drop a connection?

An important thing I do is let folks who are close to me know when I’m having an episode. It helps me not feel like I am going through the experience alone, even if it feels like it. It also alerts them to help me out if I start really suffering through one. Even if the universe seems unreal, the loving hug and kiss from my dearest can work wonders.

I have to keep in mind that all Dissociative episodes, whether they are perception problems about me or everything else, are temporary. If I was cruising along unaware of the disconnected feeling, the moment I start having one is proof that an episode has begun; therefore it will also end.

My biggest strategy is to ride it out until the episode passes. This means I need to employ many tools in my Mindfulness toolkit:

Faith – it started, and it will stop. It will start again sometime, and it will stop in that case too. I am okay regardless.

Acceptance – yeah, it’s happening. Face forward and deal. How I’m feeling about myself or my surroundings doesn’t change their reality or mine; it merely colors my own perception of my reality. If the world doesn’t seem quite right, it’s okay. If I don’t feel quite connected to humanity at the moment, it’s okay.

Be Present – especially when the universe doesn’t feel quite real. I can re-establish my connection to the universe through focus and awareness if I patiently choose to. See, my awareness has shifted without my say so: it’s up to me to get it back. If it’s an internalized thing, then I can be an alien all I need to be, but I’m Here and Now regardless of my perception of self.

Rest – man, I can’t emphasize this enough. Whatever issue a person faces, it’s a tougher slog if they’re worn out.

Take action – one common strategy for coping is to immerse oneself with sensory input that reconnects us with the world around us.  Engage the universe perceptually through the senses. When we perceive the universe it becomes real to us. The more we perceive it, the more real it becomes. Therefore as we engage the universe with our senses mindfully, consciously, reality reasserts itself in our minds.

Engage – by staying social and involved in routine and life, the episodes are likely to pass more quickly and cause less anxiety. Let the people closest to you know you’re struggling if that would help them not feel so shut out all of a sudden or distressed as you seem to be very distracted. Sure, you might need to limit your social activity at times, but make sure you are just visiting the cave and not moving into it.

Be aware – view it realistically and gauge how “bad’ the situation really is. The earliest episodes seem horrible, because you suddenly feel like everything you believed (that is, took for granted) about the real world is turned on its ear. But if you can understand just how relative the issue actually is, you can adjust your response mindfully.

Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 4 (Derealization)

Derealization: De-reality check

Imagine you’re paying for your groceries, when all of a sudden you are yanked into a state of awareness that all is not what it seems. It sounds paranoid, but paranoia is more about totally believing it. With derealization, I don’t think I ever was convinced that the life I was living wasn’t real. I was, however, convinced that I had been yanked out of connection with this reality, and it was not a pleasant experience.

Probably the reason I hate déjà vu is because it is a sudden slip out of the flow of the Here and Now, shaking me momentarily out of connection with the universe. It makes sense why I struggle to discern the pattern of Past-Intrusive Sensitivity so that I can break it: I’m trying to break the sense of reliving a pattern and get back to my connection with the standard flow of time and experience. I need to break with the alternate universe so I can get back to this one.

This one is tough to grasp, because life flows around us in a way that we take for granted. Or at least life flows in a way that we do not see each drop of water in the river flowing around us. Derealization grabs us by the shirt collar and yells in our face that none of the drops of water in that river are real, or right, or whatever.

Have you ever had your ears pop because of a sudden pressure change? For a moment, the sensation is all you can think about. It totally captures your attention as your brain says, “Crud! Something just changed!” Then it goes on a little checklist of how different you now feel. How has your hearing changed for the moment? Is there pain or discomfort? Did both ears pop or just one? That sort of thing, going on under the hood, usually beyond your conscious mind.

Sudden shifts in perceptual reality are just as jarring. But as the brain tries to process just what’s different, it gets stymied by the fact that everything seems to be just the same, you sense – get an impression – that nothing is the same. Everything was real a second ago, and now nothing is real.

If a Derealization episode passes quickly, you’re left with a vague “What in the heck was that?” feeling. But if your episode seems to go on and on, it gets frustrating. Now you are not only hyper-focused on what feels or seems wrong, your poor brain is also hollering “Why hasn’t it gone away yet? How long is this going to last?”

Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 3 (Depersonalization)

Depersonalization: Who am I again?

This is generally called an identity disorder, because it plays with your sense of who you are.

Some folks say they feel unreal, or like they don’t recognize themselves.

I’ve often said I feel like an alien and not totally related to the human race.

For me it really isn’t about losing my identity, or thinking I’m not really a human being. It has to do with the perception of the Self. Instead of feeling associated – connected – to humanity, I feel set apart from the people in my life. I don’t feel like they’re odd or unreal; it’s all a perception of me.

For me that’s the difference between Depersonalization and Derealization: Depersonalization is me; Derealization is everything else.

What happens is at some point a perception shift occurs. I go from experiencing “David” as a regular Joe who I hardly notice to experiencing “David” as a being totally alone, totally removed from “his kind,” or people like him. I become hyper-aware and hyper-focused on my uniqueness, and that only amplifies my sense of detachment from humanity.

Sometimes I like the notion that I’m significantly different from what I perceive as patterns in humanity at a particular moment. But honestly, sometimes I wish I had someone just like me to talk to about how I see and feel things, someone who “really gets it.”

Since it’s a perspective thing, I feel a bit better when I really wrap my focus around a few facts that I forget in those moments:

·         We are all unique, and in that sense there is no one “like” us. Even twins and clones will have differences in time.

·         People may never totally get what it’s like in my head, but there are many folks in my life who love me unconditionally anyway. They will do their best to listen and be there for me. Just as I don’t have to totally understand everything they go through in order to be there for them, they can be there for me regardless.

·         There actually are a bunch of folks around the world who are also feeling disjointed, disconnected, alien. It turns out that I’m not as unusual as I feel.

·         A bit ago, I felt fine and connected, which means that if this thing has a start point, it will also have an end point.

A Depersonalization episode can be very distracting, not to mention scary. Few people like to focus on themselves at vulnerable moments, but suddenly you have no choice. You are grabbed by the shirt collar and forced to look at the image in the funhouse mirror. What you see is distorted and you just can’t imagine what you see is actually you.

Having a disconnection from yourself can lead to a person being so distracted by the sensation that they start removing themselves from active involvement in things, whether just at the moment or perhaps entirely. How you feel about you affects how you interact with others and the world, so by thinking there’s something so wrong with you it can’t help but filter out into everything else.

Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 2 (Dissociative Disorder)

Dissociative Disorder: Sorry, your connection was lost

Here is my flawed understanding of what these Dissociative Disorders are all about for me.

My more-or-less literal translation of the 4 Ds is that my Connection has been lost along with my mind’s sense of Order, whether the lost connection is with Myself or Everything Else.

Everything you think and feel is based on associations. That’s why some folks can love things you can’t stand: they have a different association with that thing. Or why you really love someone who your parents can’t stand. These associations are developed by experiencing the universe through your senses and making connections; thoughts and emotions are connected to experiences and people.

These connections – these associations – we usually take for granted; except when someone tells us they enjoy mayonnaise in their chili or having spiders crawl on their face, and then we look at them as if they’ve lost their minds for having such warped views.

Mindfulness in particular teaches us to stop hurrying from point A to point B all the time at the expense of feeling and experiencing the Here and Now of the many steps in the journey. It teaches us that we are all connected to the people and universe around us, and that it is very grounding to get consciously in touch with that connection.

Now imagine you’re talking to your best friend, and suddenly your words sound hollow in your ears. Sounds almost seem to drop from “normal” to “flat.” Or maybe I just suddenly become hyper-aware of how uniquely different I am from this friend. It’s disorienting to suddenly be so completely robbed of your connection even as the words leave your mouth, especially when the friend just converses on, oblivious that a huge shift has occurred.

Now imagine you’re in the middle of a conversation with your boss about why his new budget initiative will bankrupt the company within the hour, and BAM! Just like that you are ripped away from the Here and Now and plunged into another universe that looks and feels and sounds and tastes and smells just like the one you’re from, but you know in your bones that it isn’t the real world.

Sights and sounds seem flat, like you’re watching a closed circuit TV transmission of your interactions with the world, real-time but not really here. Now you’re in the ultimate interactive video game, one where the main character does everything you do, but it isn’t really you: it’s the character you’re controlling in the game you’re playing.

We’re talking about a sudden dissociation, the opposite of association; a loss of connection rather than the achievement or maintaining of connection. Connection to what, you ask? Oh man. Everything.

So this is a perception issue. I’m not really being yanked into a parallel earth, although that might actually make me feel better about the episode: it would at least make sense then. This sudden event makes no sense to me from the moment it happens.

My subconscious awareness of connection to the grand world around me is suddenly shaken, and all I’m left with is an overwhelming, undeniable, conscious sensation that I’ve just lost that connection.

From there, it varies based on what suddenly doesn’t seem right anymore.

Mindfulness and My 4D Life - Part 1 (What are the 4 Ds?)

My life has a 4D quality:

Dissociative Disorder – Depersonalization and Derealization.

This is a tricky bunch, because I gather from reading about them that there are some standard definitions but a certain amount of leeway has to be granted. Not everyone has exactly the same experience or symptomology.

I understand that the DSM exists to standardize psychological symptoms into categories for ease of treatment (and probably insurance coverage. But I digress.). But often it seems to try and pigeonhole folks into vague or general categories without being able to properly account for the colors and textures that vary from one patient to the next.

So I will do my best and explain my flavor of this package disorder. When I say it’s a package, it is for me. I can’t comment on what other folks experience.

Here is the basic issue: sometimes I feel like an alien only roughly related to humanity, and other times I feel normal but I perceive the world around me as kind of unreal.

I’m not saying I’m ET, nor am I suggesting that I’m trying to escape the Matrix. Just that I have episodes where reality… well, ain’t quite real.

Most of the stress and anxiety from a dissociative episode stems from a few things: it’s jarring, it’s unpredictable, and it hijacks your conscious awareness. But most of all, for me, it’s because of my instant judgment of the episode: it’s a Bad Thing.

Anxiety ramps up when we stop seeing certain events of our lives as Things that are happening and start seeing them as Bad Things that are happening. If they make us uncomfortable, or aren’t what we want, we’re quick to slap a judgment label on them. Once we focus on how Bad these events are our Contentment Tank gets a huge leak and will run dry if we don’t get in there and do something about it.

I start making a huge deal about it in my mind using circular logic and assertions of how things ought to be.

Obsessive Self: “This shouldn’t be happening.”

Mindful Self: “But it is.”

“Yeah, but it shouldn’t be! Don’t you get it?”

“Yes, I get it. Regardless, it’s happening.”

“Yeah but it shouldn’t be! It’s really wrong!”

“It isn’t wrong, it is what it is. It is, however, hijacking your awareness.”

“I know! And that’s BAD!”

It sounds funny in writing, but trust me, that’s pretty much how the process snowballs in my mind within seconds.

Since it’s perceptions that are impacted, that’s where I concentrate my efforts to deal with depersonalization and derealization episodes.

If I had to choose, I’d rather experience derealization over depersonalization.  Going to sleep can remove you from the universe in a way, so it doesn’t matter if the world seems off at that point: you’re leaving it anyway. But if I feel off, it intrudes on my very sense of self, and I’m not comfortable or at ease anywhere doing anything.

Now this has nothing to do with brain-altering substances; I don’t drink alcohol or partake of anything more than temazepam certain nights. No, this was probably brought on by a number of issues growing up, which I won’t bore anyone with here, although I’ll bet I do before this series is over.

Suffice it to say, my sense of identity and place in the universe is a little odd at times.

I’ve often spoke of myself as an alien, as if I wasn’t human. I based that on how I perceived “normal people” behaved, and realized how WAY DIFFERENT I was. This got worse in time, simply because I found myself meeting lots of folks from many different walks of life, and I still never felt that I was quite like them. I felt like I was Different.

Eventually this was joined with a sense at times that what I was experiencing around me wasn’t quite real. I’ve read that some compare it to the sensation of watching the world around them as if it were a movie or a television program. Some describe it as a hazy, gauzy, dreamlike state. For me it was not really like that. I won’t say it was more profoundly disturbing than how other people perceive it, because everyone’s experience disturbs them. But I will say that, to me, my experience is supremely freaky.

Let’s look a little deeper, shall we?

Allergic to Anxiety?

When you have allergies, certain foods or times of the year can make you miserable. It isn’t so much the things or the times, but the fact that your body’s immune system overreacts to certain things, and you have a reaction to coming into contact with them.

If you go to an allergy doctor, they can identify your allergic triggers by watching how you react when brought into contact with certain known triggers. Then a strategy is devised, often a mix of medicines that help suppress the body’s immune overreaction coupled with removing the triggers from your environment (or removing yourself from triggering environments where possible).

Anxiety works a lot the same way.

Things trigger your anxiety reaction in a mental cascade effect similar to how the body reacts to allergens. And your strategy for handling it looks very similar as well.

Medications

For example, Xanax is prescribed for many sufferers of anxiety reactions. Xanax has become the mental/emotional equivalent of an allergy patient’s Benadryl. It’s almost a standard for treating mild to moderate cases of anxiety.

Many in the world don’t like the fact that Xanax exists, seeing it as a crutch. However like anything in the world that relieves anything unpleasant, it is not a crutch out of the box but can become one if the person begins to rely on it to escape regularly rather than deal with the things causing the anxious reaction.

There are other, more intense medications for severe anxiety, but they should not be taken lightly or often. Like an allergy patient’s epinephrine injection, these medications act like flipping an electric breaker closed in a house. In an extreme case it is necessary to shut the whole mechanism down to prevent catastrophe. Just as epinephrine can shut down much of the immune reaction process, these medicines can shut down much of the associative reaction process. Good for emergencies, but not to become a common tool.

Get away from them triggers!

If you are allergic to nuts, you learn to read ingredients and avoid nuts.

But if you have environmental allergies, it can be a little trickier.

Let’s say you are allergic to cats. You can find ways to live with it, such as keeping your kitty clean, reducing shed hair all over the house, and so on. But if that doesn’t work, you may have to make a decision: have cats and get used to sneezing, or learn to live without cats.

If you have huge allergy problems with spring, you might have a tough life for part of each year. Pollen from a hundred different sources can help you break world records for sneezing. While certain medicines can help, the strategy tends to be “Stay indoors when possible, and use filtered air conditioning to help alleviate symptoms.”

Environmental triggers are similar with anxiety.

If you are particularly bugged by a co-worker or a classmate, you can try and adjust environmental factors related to that person. Sometimes they are having a tough life themselves, and your unilateral kindness might be just the thing that helps you both. Learning what sets them off can help you mitigate their reactions, which in turn will alleviate yours.

Unfortunately it may be necessary to just stay away from them. Some folks are too toxic when combined with you, and they will never be safe in your world.

Likewise, if the home or workplace is the source of the anxiety, a hundred different triggers might be slamming into you from all directions. In cases like that you may have some hard decisions to make. Moving to another job or home might help, but often we move only to find ourselves besieged again by the same triggers that only look different.

Often it takes the same adjustments we make for allergy season: you can’t entirely avoid the triggers by staying isolated, but you can spend far more time in an “air conditioned environment” by removing as many triggers as possible from the other places you spend time in, or varying the places you spend your other time in.

If your workplace just crushes you with anxiety but you can’t reasonably just quit or change duties, maybe you can employ strategies for making it through so that you can go home and leave that junk behind. You may have to get home and figuratively “decontaminate.”

If home is where the triggers are heaviest, the workplace can become a haven. But rather than try and spend more and more time at work, maybe spending time going for walks, shopping, hobbies, or other diversions can help reduce our contact with our triggers.

De-sensitizing treatment strategy

When you want to really work on overcoming allergies, there are therapies for that, often in the form of allergy shots or other methods.

For example, a shot can be formulated to introduce very small amounts of allergen triggers into your system. This trains the immune system to not totally freak out every time it encounters these things.

The immune system sees the pollen come along one spring and suddenly it’s saying, “Oh, white oak pollen, huh? Yeah, I found out that stuff isn’t as dangerous as I thought.” It reacts less over time until it hardly reacts at all and you stop dreading springtime.

Anxiety triggers can be dealt with the same way. Through mindful acceptance you can co-exist with the triggers by training your mind to have less of a reaction to the stimuli. Small exposures to a trigger can help you see them as being less dangerous as previously thought. Gradually-increased contact with the trigger can help you gauge your reaction improvement.

In the case of both the physical allergy and the mental/emotional anxiety response, we gradually desensitize our systems to the triggers. The less sensitive we are to the things that cause that heartbeat to turn into a gallop or start us sweating even if we aren’t warm, the less anxious our overall lives will be.

The Benefit of Nightmares

As a Dreamwalker, I can control my dreams. Sometimes that means maneuvering a bad dream into better waters. Other times it means stopping a nightmare dead in its tracks.

But mindfully? It often means choosing intentionally to face into the darkness and deal with what’s there. Because there is a tremendous benefit in having nightmares.

It shows you where your weak spots are.

Nightmares: some mechanics

Fears, attitudes, and most every anxiety trigger you have will likely show up at some point in your dreams. When they do it’s no different in the Dreamlands than it is in the waking world. You have the exact same reactions based on the same mental and emotional conditioning.

So why are the nightmares so doggone intense?

Your fears and other triggers are under the jurisdiction of your subconscious mind. That mind has full expression in your dreams. So the trigger is amplified to cause the biggest response in you. You are on its turf.

Afraid of spiders? Suddenly you’re in a room full of them. Scared of falling from heights? You’re at the top of the Eiffel Tower and it’s stupid windy. Don’t like being humiliated? Probably should’ve got dressed before giving that big speech at work; oh that’s right, you didn’t get that luxury: this is a dream.

Whatever your anxiety trigger is, it will be given the overblown IMAX 3D THX sound Director’s Cut treatment in a nightmare. (By the way, IMAX 3D and THX are trademarked brands that I do not in any way claim or own, but are super awesome.)

So we experience that anxiety or panic or anger or whatever, and we wake up wishing we hadn’t eaten that jalapeno ice cream so close to bedtime. The next day we can feel drained or even have lingering flashbacks that re-trigger the emotional responses.

This is good stuff. No it doesn’t feel good. You’d pay to have the effects and the dreams that cause them go away.

But you may not need to pay anyone. This is a fantastic Do It Yourself project.

Get the hammer and caulking gun honey!

By hurling disturbance at you while you sleep, your subconscious mind is hoping you’ll take charge and help. Your mind doesn’t want to torture you with nightmares: shoot, it suffers right along with the rest of you. All those brain chemicals and stress reactions don’t do it any favors. It doesn’t want you to hurt; it’s asking for your help.

Whatever is causing you anxiety, you may be in Avoidance Mode while you’re awake. Hey, that’s not always a bad thing: sometimes just doing your best to stay out of triggering situations or environments is your best strategy. But if your mind won’t let the matter drop and brings it up in casual dreamtime conversation, it’s probably time to square your shoulders and face the challenge.

Will it be easy? Not usually, no. It may take many tries, most of which will probably be unsuccessful. But so much of what you accomplish in life rarely takes only one try unless you have done a lot of preparation beforehand. Like fixing something in your home, it might take hammering on this, caulking that, and generally troubleshooting the problem until you find it and make sure it's really fixed.

Dream Control (called Lucid Dreaming by some) just means that you get to make conscious decisions and take an active role in your dreams. Your subconscious mind gets to intrude on your conscious thoughts all the time. Why not return the favor and consciously, intentionally dream?

However you get to that point, you will notice the need to really apply Mindful techniques. (I know these strategies have different names in different philosophical and psychological realms. I’m just sticking with Mindfulness because she’s the one that brung me to the dance.)

Acceptance comes into play because much of the anxiety you’re feeling has to do with struggle. As you struggle to avoid the feelings or the triggers, you develop an anxious response that can take on a life of its own. So learning to accept that the trigger will occur no matter what you do will free you to choose a healthier response.

So you struggle not to get too close to the edge of the cliff, then you struggle to maintain your footing, then you struggle to not fall over the edge, then you struggle to hang on to the thin thread of hope that keeps you from dropping. Motion pictures use this kind of tension builder so often I’ve started laughing at some of them. Filmmakers know that people have an anxiety reaction to this kind of inexorable edging towards disaster, so they use it to get you on the edge of your seats.

Of course, like any tool, it gets overused. And if a filmmaker turns the screws too tightly, it crosses the line from tense to ridiculous, and I laugh. (Hey Hollywood: if you don’t want me laughing at crucial tension-filled moments, get a clue and stop tightening it beyond that point. Thank you.)

Accept and dare

So if I’m struggling so hard to not fall over the edge and it seems that no matter what I do I get closer to the edge, there’s my first moment of enlightenment. By accepting I am going over the edge regardless, I stop the unwinnable struggle. You can’t prevent it, so trying to do so will deplete your mental energy and deprive you of rest and peace. You’re going to plunge; as comedian Christopher Titus said once, if you keep struggling “you’re just gonna die tired.”

Now that you’ve accepted you can’t change the situation, develop a strategy to face the inevitable and unavoidable. “Man up,” as a certain generation says. “Grow a set,” as another generation is fond of saying. Or “Put your big girl panties on”: same generation, slightly different gender.

The point is to know the difference between what you can change and what you can’t. Once you recognize you can’t do anything about a situation, you are free to not keep wasting resources struggling and save them for dealing with the consequences. Not only will you have more rest and peace, you will be in a way better frame of mind to deal with what comes next. The best news: the consequences are often way less horrible than our imagination led us to believe.

Dare yourself to confront your fears and doubts. Identify your triggers and figure ways to accept and deal with them, whatever that will mean. Have faith that you can do this.

And remember the value of the nightmare. It may have scared you and woke you up at 2:30 in the morning in a sweat, but it was also a cry for your assistance. Be a superhero and answer this distress call from your subconscious mind. When you do, you will learn more about yourself, along with practical strategies for reducing your anxiety reactions to certain triggers.

And that particular nightmare will probably be gone for good.

Now to tackle the one about being lost and late for an appointment.