Hands down, our most beloved and requested plushies are the Anxiety Rabbits. This seems to be such a universal occurrence right now that it seems appropriate to dig in a little more to help us all understand anxiety better and find ways to manage it.

First, anxiety has three main components: emotional, physiological, and cognitive. 

The emotional part is what we commonly refer to as worry. This is the feeling of dread, concern, or impending doom that something terrible is about to happen. The physical part can manifest as heart palpitations, a twisting tightening of the stomach, or sweating. The cognitive element is the part that can get us in the most trouble - but it’s also the key to learning how to manage our anxiety. This is when we catastrophize, when the emotional feeling gets tacked onto a fully-formed thought or imagined outcome. 

Everybody experiences anxiety at some point in their lives, but when it goes from a periodic episode to something that dominates our daily thoughts, it’s classified then as a disorder. 

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As an aside, let us define disorder: a disorder is any condition - mental, emotional, or physical - that interrupts daily living, causes ongoing distress, or creates sustained inconvenience or impairment. It’s not a disease necessarily as that is specifically a defined medical condition with a clear cause, like rheumatoid arthritis. And a syndrome is a collection of symptoms that occur under the umbrella of a particular diagnosis, but each symptom is often treated separately from each other.

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Just to make things a little spicier, there are a few different types of anxiety disorders. An ongoing sense of foreboding and constant heightened state of vigilance and anticipation is a major feature of generalized anxiety disorder, but when that constant state frequently escalates into episodes of extreme distress, that’s a panic disorder. When you’re (mostly) fine at home but start getting freaked out when you have to be around other people, that’s social anxiety disorder (also known as sociophobia). Then there are all kinds of phobias attached to specific things like heights, spiders, holes, or the fear that somehow, somewhere, there is a duck watching you. (Okay, this last one, anatidaephobia, is actually totally fictional, but you get the idea.)

It’s almost impossible for most of us to imagine a life without anxiety, particularly since the world seems to be giving us so many very good reasons to worry. Women and those in the more emotional-labor-intense roles tend to experience more anxiety than men and those with less emotional labor, but the former group tend to internalize anxiety into depression and reactive disorders while the latter group will more likely externalize it into things like substance abuse and escapism. 

Can We Make It Stop?

And yet, we don’t ever actually want to be completely free of anxiety because it evolved as a critical survival skill. Our squishy human brains have a triune of mechanisms with which to detect danger - rational, emotional, and instinctive - and anxiety (remember, all three parts of it) is the reaction to that triune activating. That whole system developed to protect us from saber-toothed tigers and really bad weather; it’s a royal pain in the buns when it activates in response to answering emails or having to make a doctor’s appointment.

But, if we over-rationalize and consciously ignore our anxieties, then real threats are able to get through our defenses and we get hurt. People who’ve been through intense trauma have their “anxiety threat threshold” neurologically skewed, so they may either be in a constant state of anxiety or else hardly experience any at all. If we don’t have a little guidance to figure out what is and isn’t a serious threat, we can easily end up developing self-destructive habits or else avoiding the world altogether. There are dozens of methods of therapy that can help us work through it, though cognitive behavior therapy (also known in non-psychotherapy circles as mindfulness) is the go-to because it has a lot of excellent research demonstrating its effectiveness.

All By Your Onesies

There are some things you can do for yourself in the meantime. (If this sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve said it before.) First, don’t ever let yourself get caught up in the idea that you’re just overthinking or catastrophizing: Think of it more as pre-solving problems by imagining them ahead of time. Of course, it helps to keep all those ideas in a journal because writing it down is science, which means not writing it down is just horsing around. You don’t even have to make a whole big thing about it, just jotting down a note or two will do.

Second, recognize that states of anxiety are taking us out of the Now; we’re worried about the future, or we’re obsessing over the past, and that means that the present doesn’t get our full attention. So, find something that grounds you in the Right Now. This is the idea behind “touching grass”, by the way, and while that’s not a terrible idea, it’s not always possible, like in the middle of a work shift or when you're in a cubicle on the sixtieth floor somewhere. 

Activate your five main senses: 

• Sniff something pleasant (coffee, candles, tea)
• Look at something you love
• Touch and pet and squeeze your Plushie Friend
• Listen to music that doesn’t require emotional investment (lo-fi is good or any other chill-out stream)
• and Eat something nutritious because vitamin deficiencies can certainly make anxiety issues worse. 

(If you’re really spinning out, though, and can’t eat, you can sprinkle a very little, we mean just a few grains of salt on your tongue.)

Third, you gotta talk to someone about this. Ideally, it should be some kind of brain-meat specialist, but a close and wise friend will do in a pinch, and you can totally use both. The reason to talk to someone, though, is to create a web of accountability for your anxiety. When you’re not sure if something is a problem, check in with the people around you: is the vibe off and you’re missing it? Or is the vibe cool and you’re overanalyzing things? Use your community to help you recalibrate your ancient evolutionary survival mechanisms into something that works for the forces of good instead of evil.

The hardest part of being alive right now is that it’s impossible to tell anyone that they have nothing to worry about, and, yes, that used to be the go-to rationalization inside therapist offices. Now, we don’t do ourselves any favors by ignoring the loud-and-clear signals we’re getting from the world, but we do need to make sure that we are the ones making the decisions about how to handle those perceived threats. Anxiety can be a phenomenal early-warning system, but it’s a terrible driver.

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Disclaimer

The information in this and other articles are based on both experience and extensive research through credible and science-backed sources. However, neither Plushie Dreadfuls, Mysterious LLC, or any of our other alter-egos are those kinds of doctors, and this article is not meant as a substitute for the care or advice from a medical or mental health professional. Please use this information responsibly and pursue formal support as needed. (You can probably take your Plushie Friend with you.)