Anxiety. We all know the feeling. Anxiety is that feeling of dread or worry, uneasiness, nervousness, being stressed out, and not being sure what to do about it.
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Anxiety refers to a state of inner turmoil that might arise from insecurity, lack of confidence, or fear. Everyone feels anxious about something at one point or another. It is a normal reaction to people, things, and events that you cannot control. However if anxiousness leads to constant worrying overthinks that do not normally elicit a such reaction, it can be a sign that a disorder is probably starting to develop.
many people use anxiety and fear interchangeably however, the two are different in reality. Anxiety can simply pertain to uneasiness while fear requires immediate threat. Feeling the two is still expected, but when worry becomes the reason for anxiety, it marks an anxiety disorder.
Contrary to normal fear, someone who is already suffering from anxiety problem starts to feel the fear even without threat. Fear takes over the function of anxiousness, becoming a common emotion even when simple worrying should have been enough. For instance, when facing an audience, you start to feel afraid when all you should have been dealing with is worrying about their opinions. Their opinions are no immediate threat, but you feel like bad comments about you will already ruin your life and put you in a lifetime of embarrassment; whereas in reality, people do not really remember everything you do in the past, more so judge you based on one small mistake.
What exactly is anxiety? How do we go about defining it?
Anxiety is how our body reacts when faced with uncertainty, danger, or stressful situations. This manifests itself as the feeling we call anxiety. Anxiety can lead to health problems in our bodies such as headaches, queasiness, trouble sleeping, and heart palpitations, among many other symptoms. A normal, healthy level of anxiety doesn't normally interfere with our lives - it's when anxiety is ongoing daily that our anxiety becomes a problem that needs to be addressed.
It may be helpful to realize that if you feel anxiety, you're not alone as nearly 120 million adult people around all over the world experience anxiety in one form or another. The different types of anxiety range from Generalized Anxiety Disorder to phobias to panic attacks to Social Anxiety, and Separation Anxiety, among many others, and each of these forms of anxiety has the potential to affect our health negatively.
For instance, our anxiety might make us restless, make our muscles tense up, cause us to feel tired, and reduce our concentration. This can have a paradoxical effect because we may actually begin to worry about our anxiety. In other words, we might even get anxious about our anxiety! We may also end up withdrawing from those situations or things that have made us feel anxiety in the past.
We may lose our appetite or become jumpy and tense and develop " ticks " such as tapping our foot on the ground or pacing back and forth. Anxiety is not the same thing as fear. Fear is the concern for an immediate threat while anxiety refers to concern for a perceived threat that we believe we may experience in the future. That being said, we must address our anxiety, especially our feeling of chronic anxiety.
If we don't we may well experience certain physiological symptoms which is our body's way of letting us know that there is anxiety that will not just be ignored. Some of the more common forms of these physiological symptoms of anxiety which you may even have personally experienced include headaches, shortness of breath, chest pain, tremors, tiredness, perspiration, heart palpitations, nausea, diarrhea, indigestion, weight gain, and even impotence.
So you can see how important it is to take this subject of anxiety seriously for the sake of both our psychological and physical well-being. When we begin to understand anxiety and what we can do about it we can take actions that will significantly decrease if not completely eliminate the feelings of dread, stress, and worry that we may be feeling inside ourselves. We can enjoy more of life and live more so in the manner we were meant to live: without these feelings of anxiety.
Four questions to analyze your anxiety
1) What Situations are likely to activate anxiety or fear?
External events might be the act of public speaking, observing a snake in a glass case, or being in an enclosed space that you temporarily can't escape. Internal events might be imagining creepy scenes, traumatic remembrances, night terror, and other negative sensations that you associate with fear.
What can you tell yourself about these situations that can evoke or intensify fear?
Try to stop thinking for the next five minutes and see what happens. Most people typically don't monitor their flow of thought. But when you think about your thinking, your metacognitive ability rise above the flow of thought. By knowing what you are looking for, you can defeat fear thinking and companion states, such as double-trouble panic over the prospect of panicking. You can teach yourself to recognize and debunk the unnecessary fear of thinking.
What coexisting conditions add to your vulnerability to distress?
Parasitic anxieties and fears rarely occur independently of other conditions such as anger, perfectionism, anger, depression, blame, procrastination, impulsiveness, addiction, insecurity, inhibition, and so on. Knowing what coexisting states affect you, and how they operate alongside anxiety can give you an edge in your fight against needless fear.
What physical forms do your fears and anxieties take?
When you feel bombarded by worries over your health, concerns about your future, and dread about feeling intense, you can come to experience physical symptoms that correspond to where you are most physically vulnerable.
Muscle tension, chest pain, and gastrointestinal problems can be symptoms of anxiety. Some of these physical factors could reflect a medical problem. If you haven't done so, it would be wise to have a medical checkup to assure yourself that any persistent anxieties don't have a medication or disease connection.
Some medications such as Valium ( diazepam ), used for relaxation, can produce the very anxiety symptoms that they are supposed to reduce. A hyperactive thyroid condition can stimulate anxious feelings and thoughts. In the majority of cases, parasitic fears and anxieties are psychological issues. If your physical symptoms are extensions of psychological fears, then it makes sense to deal with the fears using techniques that get at fear-related thinking and behavior.
Change your mindset to reduce anxiety and boost self-esteem
Your mind is your very own enemy. The good thing about it is that it is not controlled by any villain or alien life form because you can still regain total control over it if only you really want to.
These four tips can help you change your mindset for the better.
1. Ponder if your fears and worries are real or not.
Everyone has a valid reason to be scared and worried. Some cause minor hiccups but some are life-changing. The question that you need to ask though is if your fears and worries are real or just figments of your imagination.
Do you know how customer service professionals entertain complaints? They ask what the problem is and then validate it first before they look for a solution and find who is accountable. They do not proceed to the bigger steps if the problem cannot be validated, to begin with.
Whenever you realize that you are reacting negatively to something, ask yourself first if your reaction is really called for. Do not create something to spend your time at when you can just shrug it off within a few seconds.
2. Stop catastrophizing and just focus on the real problem.
Catastrophizing is defined as the mental habit of putting terrible endings in every event regardless of the real situation and the factors involved leading to the event. When you start catastrophizing something, you subconsciously connect a chain of unfortunate events until you can think of the best excuse to feel bad and scared. Maybe it does help in creating a plan like in a business where the decision-makers have to be proactive to preempt the worst-case scenario.
However, when you do it daily without a valid reason to do so, you become nothing but a pessimistic, strength-sucking parasite who likes to bring other people's spirits down with you. You are doing all the misfortunes to yourself, not as a result of natural events but as the result of your own decisions and actions.
Instead of just connecting so many terrible possibilities to your current situation, start focusing only on the problem and act fast before it leads to another terrible event. Focus on the present and not on the future, especially when the future you see does not motivate and inspire you anyway.
3. Reframe your vision to see only the positive side.
They say that every situation, favorable or not, always has two sides: the good and the bad. Unfortunately, people with anxiety disorders choose to only see the bad side of everything for reasons that many psychologists attribute to the need for validation ( knowing that they are right about the inevitable tragic outcome ), authority ( knowing that they know something others do not know ), and indulgence ( the chemical structure of their brain somehow inclines their mind to think negatively ). Can you control this? Yes!
The mind of a person with an anxiety disorder is set on a pessimistic mode by default. Nevertheless, a person who can think, move, and live is still in control of his mind. He only needs to be aware every time he thinks of something bad and entertains his illogical fears and worries, be consciously controlling of his thoughts, and reprogram the negatives into positives. Deliberately looking for the good in the bad can help you reframe your vision for the better.
4. Think about the solution and not the problem.
A problem that has already presented itself in front of you will not change no matter how hard you think about it and how long you feel bad about it. It is already there and it will not go away unless you find a solution to it. Move on to the next stage of solving the problem after identifying it.
Think about what you can do to solve the problem or alleviate the situation with your current abilities and resources. If you think that what you have is not enough, look at the possibility of asking for help, developing your current abilities, looking for additional resources, and finding a new solution if really necessary.
Act fast because the longer you delay the solution, the more illogical thoughts your mind will create to scare you even more.
Meditation
Meditation is a technique that has been around for thousands of years. It has a lot of practical uses for de-stressing and calming you down even in our modern world. The main idea behind all forms of meditation is to clear out the mind from all the things that are bothering you starting by slowing down your breathing.
There are a few different types of meditation that you can focus on, but we will take a look at one of the most basic types. To get started with this one, you will need to set aside about fifteen minutes each day, or twice a day if you feel you would benefit from it, where you won't be interrupted at all. Pick out a nice quiet room and get yourself comfortable. A pillow to sit on, a blanket in case you get cold, and a timer to help keep track of time if you need to be somewhere ( so you don't focus on the clock ), can all be tools to help you out.
When you are ready, sit down on the floor with your legs crossed and your back nice and straight. This gives you a good alignment that will help the airflow through your body as you breathe. If sitting on the floor is uncomfortable or you can't do it, it is just fine to sit on a chair, as long as you keep your feet flat on the floor and sit up straight. Your hands can just rest in your lap.
Now close your eyes and start some steady breathing in and out. Your breathing may be a little fast at first, but try to concentrate all of your energy on getting it to slow down a bit. The deep breaths should help to fill your body with good energy while the exhales will dispel all that bad energy.
The goal during this is to try and just think about your deep breathing. For beginners, this is going to be hard. You are used to keeping your mind going all of the time, and giving up on that and clearing out the brain completely is going to seem impossible. The good news is that this will happen, it just takes some time. If your mind begins to wander, and it is sure to do this in the beginning, just gently bring it back to focusing on your breath. Don't feel bad that it went off course or get mad at yourself for this mental transgression. Having these emotions will just make it harder to get the benefits.
For some people, just concentrating on their breathing is not going to be enough. This is where some other forms of meditation can come into play. Some people will repeat or think about a word that they can concentrate on, some will bring in some gentle music, or you can purchase a guided meditation to help focus. All of these can be great choices because they still help you to relax and get your mind off the things that are bothering it in real life.
You will find that meditation can help out in many different aspects of your life. Not only will it help you to become more connected with your emotions and become self-aware of what is going on with you, but some people use it to help promote better sleep, to help them relax, and it is a great tool to help with anxiety and stress. No matter what method you use meditation for, you are going to see a ton of great benefits in the process.
I hope you found this article helpful for you. I hope these methods help you to reduce your anxiety and fear. Do not forget to share it with your friends and families. :)