ARCH for Anxiety

I do my best writing in a beach chair… It’s true! Sitting out in the sun beside a body of water almost immediately puts my mind at ease and connects me with my most aspirational thoughts. Whenever I was stuck on a passage or developing a new concept for my book, I would grab my beach chair, my sunglasses, and my journal, and head for the lake at the state park a few miles from my house. I’d spend a few hours writing down my unedited thoughts and soaking up the sun before heading back home to elaborate on my laptop.

A lot of work on my book got done this way. In fact, I can’t think of a single chapter that doesn’t have at least one concept originally developed while seated beside the lake or the beach. For those wondering why it took me so long to finish my work, there are only so many warm months in the state I live in!

I just recently returned from a brief escape from the winter weather in PA and was looking at my travel journal. My last written entry was an outline of my personal approach to coping with anxiety that I was developing for the last two chapters of Become ALIVE. I called the approach the ARCH method, which in the journal entry stood for: Awareness, Reappraisal, Centering, and Handing off. I have since changed Awareness to Attunement (so as not to confuse readers with the Awareness section of each chapter) and Handing off has been rebranded as Hope.

Here is how I outline the approach in the book. You can compare this to the included picture for an example of how these concepts get developed from beach chair to office chair:

The ARCH process begins with Attunement. Attunement is a prompt for me to become aware of my physical and mental state, my surroundings, and the encounter I am having. In this first step, I am evaluating whether I am a conscious actor in this moment or if I am reacting to what I believe the encounter means. In the Attunement phase, it is important for me to first recognize that I am having an emotional and physiological response to a stressor, and second to establish whether I am facing a true threat or a stressful situation.

In the Awareness section you described what you felt in your brain and body in response to a true threat and to a stressful situation. Although your response in this section had you tuning into your brain and body after the fact, it is the same process you will use to focus your attention on the emotional and physiological response happening to you in future scenarios. If you listed any differences in the ways you felt in your brain and body in response to each of these scenarios, you may already have an answer for how to tell the difference between a true threat and a stressful situation. If, however, your brain and body respond similarly to both scenarios, you may have to evaluate the difference by assessing the facts of the matter.

The second step in ARCH is Reappraisal and is a prompt for me to take a step back and ask myself if there are alternatives to how I am seeing the situation. In this step, I am evaluating the story I am telling myself and looking for a narrative that may restore my sense of agency. A change in the context of a stressor may change how I am relating to the stressor and may open up possibilities for managing it I was not seeing previously. A good example of what I mean by this would be the one I used in the previous lesson, May I Speak to The Distress Manager, about the difference between being caught in a rainstorm when you are a farmer worried about your sun-parched crops and being caught in that same rainstorm when you’ve just laid your blanket out for a lovely picnic lunch. The conditions are the same in both scenarios (you are getting rained on). What is different is how we feel based on how we’re relating to the situation. Whatever feeling we are having, in whatever moment we are having it in, is happening within us and is not dictated by the situation itself. There is no universal way to feel about the rain. If I were a farmer, I might be overjoyed by the rain coming down around me. Reappraisal offers me an opportunity to shift to this more helpful perspective, reclaim my power, and reduce my distress.

Centering is the third step and reminds me to calm my nervous system and return to my essential self. My essential self is the part of me not affected by external factors because it is firmly anchored to my intrinsic self-worth. Even if I am a picnicker and am frustrated to be caught in the rain, I do not need to allow the situation to define me or dictate my response. From this position, I can transcend the stressful situation I find myself in because I know it does not change me in any concrete way. I am not my environment, my emotions and distress are temporary. Remember from our previous lesson that centering requires a focus on the breath. Slowing and steadying our breathing is the quickest way to shift our brains out of survival mode and back into an ideal performance state from which to take intentional action.

Hope is the fourth step and is a prompt for me to consider how attached I am to controlling the outcome of whatever situation I find myself in. Hope is about acknowledging my own efforts while recognizing my inability to guarantee a certain outcome. This is a tough concept for many of us to grasp as contemplating our lack of control over outcomes often highlights our powerlessness, a disheartening emotion most of us are loath to allow ourselves to feel. However, the reality is that as powerful as we can be in our finest moments, there are many things outside of the realm of our control. By and large we cannot make decisions for others or make others act how we want them to. We cannot always control our environment. We cannot stop the march of time or keep the earth from spinning on its axis or orbiting the sun. The list goes on and on. (Feeling hopeful so far?)

Where the hope comes in is on the other side of this coin, in that relinquishing the responsibility to ensure outcomes can be quite liberating. If you are feeling burdened by the heavy weight of needing things to work out in a certain way, you may find it quite relieving to simply put that burden down, stand back, and hope for the best. Does this mean we make no attempt to change our circumstances or our perspective of our circumstances? No, quite the opposite. If there are actions you could take to improve your circumstances or your outlook, by all means pursue them diligently. What the Hope step asks us to do is to maintain a duality, to do our best to achieve an outcome and to also trust the outcome to something greater than ourselves once we have exhausted the resources we have at our disposal.

We use trust in this dual sense as well. There is a trust one can have in themselves or in the situation that is an emotional state similar to confidence. It is about having experience and making some preparation for what may be required. However, there is a deeper trust similar to courage that one must have and exercise if they want to grow, even in times when they have no experience and may not be fully prepared. The first trust (the emotional state) is the one we can have in ourselves and our efforts; the deeper trust (the act of trusting) is the one that allows us to move forward and let go of being in charge of the outcome.