Hypervigilant Living: The Subtitle of Anxiety

Hypervigilance is a symptom of anxiety.

Webster’s defines hypervigilance as:

Keenly watchful to detect danger.

Wary.

Ever awake and alert.

Sleeplessly watchful.

Hypervigilance is continually overdone awareness and it feeds anxiety.

For the visual learner, imagine anxiety as a weed. Think of hypervigilance as the rain that cultivates the growth of a weed that eventually consumes your yard. If enough rain comes, your yard is almost unrecognizable.

When hypervigilance takes over the anxious life, you, my friend, are unrecognizable.

How is hypervigilance experienced?

Mentally, it’s experienced in overdone awareness, chronic irritability, disconnecting from others or work, difficulty remaining present or focused; and distracted concentration.

Physically, one experiences hypervigilance with muscle tension and the inability to settle the body down.

Relationally, hypervigilance robs the individual of being present. Similar to a porcupine; one can become prickly, hard to get close to, and somewhat dangerous when on guard.

While hypervigilance often impacts negatively, it can also be functional and helpful. It can aide us in keeping children safe and when walking home at night alone.

In an extreme example, hypervigilance is quite helpful and functional if we are being chased by a bear. However, most often we aren’t. But relationally, we might be functioning as if a bear is chasing us. Imagine the difficulty of cuddling up to your partner or having a meaningful discussion while the proverbial bear is chasing you.

Example:

If you’ve ever experienced intense suffering or death with those close to you, you may have trouble being at ease around those you love. You may often remain alert and on guard for anything dangerous. This state of alertness at times may be helpful, but quite often risking the quality of life that comes from being present and connected.

Another:

If in the past you’ve experienced betrayal, hurt, or deception in relationships. Your life goal may become guarding against the possibility of another occurrence. The hypervigilant may struggle to stay present while often wrestling with the past as a pair of sunglasses. As a note: the antidote to hypervigilance is not reckless behavior. The antidote is far more connected to a balanced perspective of danger and human behavior. 

It would be accurate to say that hypervigilance is often triggered by negative past events. While we can’t protect ourselves from every negative occurrence, we can work towards tempering hypervigilance for the sake of our relationships and quality of life.

A solution.

One way to manage hypervigilance is to take inventory of what is in our control and what is not; checking our level of anxiety with the things we are able to control. I believe the hypervigilant may be tempted to borrow far more responsibility than what is in their control. Our relationships and quality of life begin to suffer when we take on the emotional baggage of what is in other people’s control.

I regularly sit with anxious clients and have them create lists like this:

Purposefully drawing a line between what is in our control and what is not is one way to calm the hypervigilance of anxiety.

The cost.

If unchecked, hypervigilance creates an anxious environment that yields a reduction in the quality of relationships and lives. My end is to bring an awareness to this part of anxiety and to encourage you to live connected to the present.