Q&A 26 – Anxiety and Urgency: Does your past matter?

When we experience feelings of anxiety and urgency do we need to dig into the past to figure out where they started in order to deal with and resolve them?

In this episode I explore how the answer to that question is actually, ‘no’. Feelings of urgency and anxiety are feedback from our innate wisdom. We experience them so that they can help us and when we see them this way they begin to dissipate without any kind of intervention, pharmaceutical or otherwise.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below. 

Show Notes

* How urgency and anxiety fall in the same family of feelings

* What anxiety and urgency are really trying to tell us

* How we misunderstand that message

* How we’re designed to settle down automatically

* What to do (if anything) when we feel anxiety or urgency

Transcript of episode

Hello, explorers, and welcome to Q&A; episode 26 of Unbroken. I’m your host, Alexandra Amor. 

I’m here today with a question from someone who emailed me over the weekend. And I thought it was a really good subject so that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

The question is, does our past matter when we’re dealing with things like anxiety and urgency? 

This is such a good question because in the old psychological paradigm, the one that we’re so used to, and the one that most self-help type books and courses and understanding are based on our past does matter, it really matters. And we need to dig into that past in order to heal or resolve the things that are going on with us in the present. 

What I’m here today to share is that actually, our past is a lot less important than we think it is. 

As I say that, I want to emphasize that I’m not trying to negate the things that happened to you or to me in the past, and the feelings that we had about those. About neglectful upbringings or trauma that we experienced in the past. So this is the caveat at the beginning, I’m not framing this in a way, or trying to get across the message, that your past doesn’t actually matter because of course, that’s not true. 

What I’m going to talk about is how, when we’re looking for resolution to problems that we’re having, or things that we’re experiencing in this day, in this particular case, we’re going to talk about anxiety and urgency, is that the past isn’t the place to look. That’s what I’m that’s what I’m trying to emphasize. 

So let’s talk about the question that I received from a listener was about, specifically about urgency. Another thing I want to say too, and I’ve talked about in the past, and this is why she actually emailed me, I’ve talked in the past about how urgency is one of the things that I’ve dealt with in the past. And it took me a while to realize, and I’ll share this with you guys that:

Urgency and anxiety are the same thing. I think of them as falling under the same umbrella, or the same family of experiences that we have there. 

They’re specific in that they might feel like, like someone with anxiety might feel like they don’t feel a sense ...