Anxiety and Your Big Toe

There are two things you need to know about Anxiety. The first one you already know, and here I will only remind you.
FIRST: Anxiety is a form of fear.
SECOND: YOU CAN ERASE ANXIETY IN 90 SECONDS OR LESS SIMPLY BY PLACING YOUR ATTENTION INSIDE YOUR BODY.

According to the neuroanatomist, Jill Bolte Taylor,Ph. D., it takes 90 seconds for an emotion to drain out of your awareness. Since your Right Brain does not DO fear or anxiety, all you have to do to stop anxiety is to shift your awareness into your Right Brain and hold this for a minute and a half. Will the anxiety return? Perhaps, but it only takes a quick brain shift to erase it again. If you follow the brain shift with a new activity which you enjoy, the anxiety takes much longer to show up again. As long as you are having fun, anxiety is an unwelcome guest.

Why the big toe? Because it is a prominent part of your body that is easy to locate with your attention, and you can move your attention from there up to your ankles, calves, knees, thighs, torso, and whatever it takes to keep your attention in the present moment until the anxiety disappears. That's the beauty of maintaining your attention in your body. It's so easy, and so healthy, too. Following your breath works too, of course. Whatever guides your attention into the present moment will work fine. Once the anxiety is gone, you can choose from lots of emotional options.

What is interesting in my own experience is that the more often you interrupt anxiety, the less time it takes to erase it. So if you take up the habit of stopping anxiety as soon as it appears, anxiety shows up less and less.

But, then, what will keep you safe? Actually you cannot totally disconnect your two brains. Unplugging totally is not an option. There is the corpus callosum to send messages back and forth so when you place your attention in the NOW, you are computing mostly with you Right Brain, enough to cancel out the anxiety, but you can count on your Left Brain kicking in if you actually are facing real danger. The Right Brain is not stupid, it is simply more interested in joy, peace, love, creativity, and connection, than in scaring you to death or hounding you with anxiety.

So if you set up a new pattern of interrupting anxiety each time it shows up, and thus spend a lot of time using your Right Brain, what will happen when you need to access the Left Brain? The Left Brain takes care of numbers as well as language, so there are times when you definitely need it. All you have to do when you need your own Left Brain is make a list. To make a list, you need the information from the past, the future, the need to number the items and judge these. All these are Left Brain skills, and they won't disappear if you use them less. Our culture is 91% Left Brained (so says Dr. Taylor in "My Stroke of Insight") so using your Right Brain more often (to erase anxiety) or just for the fun of it, gives you a decided advantage. Also, joy and peace and creativity have a lot of good feelings around them. These are waiting for you via your big toe. Right or Left, doesn't matter.