The brilliant poet Maya Angelou experienced acute anxiety every time she gave a reading of her work. Her advice for conquering the kind of fear she endured when sharing her work was, “Accept it. Don’t fight it.”

How many times do we fight with ourselves, pummelling the feelings we experience back down into some tiny pocket of our bodies, hoping that they can be safely contained there? But we are fooling ourselves, right? Fooling ourselves because the mind and the body simply can’t be separated. Deepak Chopra puts it so beautifully when he writes ‘Anything that happens in the mental universe must leave tracks in the physical one.’

Perhaps we should take a second to recall a moment of intense emotion and just place a hand on the part of the body where we are experiencing a corresponding sensation. My anxiety sits deep in my belly. As I write this, wondering where my thoughts are taking me, and whether anyone will be interested, I notice a familiar stirring of what feels like a thousand tiny tentacles begin to untangle themselves. Let them, I think.

Let them, because if I try and do anything about them, I am giving them attention. Attention makes them feel important. Like a bully who feeds off the pain she causes, her sense of power engorged with each new jibe. And the thing is, the fear I am feeling can’t tell the difference between a real threat and a perceived threat. Sometimes we are more scared of what we imagine, then anything that actually happens. If we think something is worth fearing, then we become afraid. To throw in a little Shakespeare here, there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

But my God it’s so easy to overthink, isn’t it? Did I say the right thing? Am I good enough? What if they say no? What if I look stupid? What if everyone recognises the imposter that I surely am?

All those thoughts, all those internal battles, all that fear. It’s exhausting! Why are we expending so much energy on stuff that isn’t even real? Because none of it is, all those fears only exist in our minds. Everything revolves around our perceptions. All of it is about us, and when it is all about us that is too much pressure to hold off.

You know that little exercise that people suggest we do when we begin to feel overwhelmed – either in your head or out loud, name 5 things you can see, 4 things you can touch, 3 things you can hear, 2 things you can smell, 1 thing you can taste? The only point of it is to shift the focus from yourself; while you are busy thinking ‘but I can’t smell anything!’ you have taken the attention off the anxiety inducing thoughts. Fear, when you boil it all down, is really a misdirection of attention. We can acknowledge it, but if we do more than that it drags us deeper into its undergrowth. If we attach meaning to it, its branches grow ever more tangled.

We know that sports psychologists ask their athletes to visualise the race, throw, penalty etc. They ask them to visualise the track, the pitch, the crowds watching. They ask them to visualise themselves lifting the trophy, having that gold medal draped around their neck. When they did this, it was noted categorically that performances Improved. When we imagine ourselves performing a particular action, our muscular activity increases in those very muscle groups that would usually perform the activity, as if we were doing it in real life.

THE BODY CAN’T TELL THE DIFFERENCE

We are responsive, empathetic, imaginative creatures We can imagine all sorts of things. And imagination in this sense is synonymous with doing. This gives us power. We can direct our attention another way.

I have another strategy for when my inner monologue fires up and gets my anxiety churning.

I talk back.

But who am I talking to?

In my case she is called Zara. I named her because she arrived while I was trying on clothes in a particular store. Nothing was looking right, and the voice became physical. A feeling of anxiety consumed my belly. Even my hands felt big and useless. Obviously, I left the shop.

What I did next was to name this voice. Now when she shows up, I acknowledge her but tell her I’m ok.

And giving her a name makes me laugh, makes her familiar, lessens her grip.

I have externalised my inner saboteur. I have disrupted the relentless and ultimately pointless self-talk that attaches weight and value to the fear. I can use my imagination to propel me forward not hold me back.

I just realised I have forgotten all about those belly tentacles I mentioned earlier. Think I’ll share this before they begin to stir again.