What Anxiety Does to You
Anxiety is a form of mental illness that breaks one’s mind down into tiny pieces and gathers it again only to shatter it further. During this process, it’s attempting to communicate a lot of information to the mind and body hoping (or not) that it can take it all.
Anxiety usually stems from fear of the unknown, a threat sort of. And unknown things normally spring from an unpredictable future. Tomorrow is an example. Anxiety keeps you away from living in the present, in the NOW, and tries to evade it with thoughts about what tomorrow will bring.
Anxiety steals both your NOW and your future.
One insidious aspect of anxiety is that most times, we suffer from it in an attempt to make our NOW better. So, for instance, you may be going through something anxious-triggering, a difficult emotion as such. In the bid to solve that situation, you propagate your thoughts to the future for the know-how, which ends up exacerbating your now-anxious state. In other words, it steals both your NOW and your future.
It does this simply by eroding your state of consciousness to acknowledging your present moment while catering to the future.
Anxiety sucks a lot.
It needs a lot of empathy and a high level of understanding to navigate through life when loving or living with someone who suffers from it. And as such, it’s easy to uproot a relationship that doesn’t quite support that frame of mind — exceeding the other aspects. It also becomes easy to highlight mistakable signs which show how someone might not be up for all that “baggage” after all (meanwhile, having somebody tell you that enlists one of those signs).
Anxious people are people. They don’t just have a better means to manage certain (unforeseen) triggers when they arise. But that aside, they’re normally equally very loving, empathetic, understanding, and highly conscientious due to their nature. They always ‘get it’ on a large scale, and so knows what it feels like not to receive any of these from others.
Anxiety plays with your mind. Playing with it comes from teaching you exaggerated ways to respond to minor things. Most times, as a matter of “me” fact, anxiousness tends to pipe low with much bigger things at times than minor things. Hence, the wordplay.
But anxiety can keep you on a 110% alertness. It over prepares you for something, especially for the future. It leverages its uneasy attribute to provide you with quick solutions at times when going through some triggers. As such, it sort of solves the problem.
But like Nick Wignall once asserted the more we try to evade the difficult feelings we get, the more intense it becomes. Therefore, learning how not to criticize, judge or escape those feelings, but rather acknowledge and let them dissipate on their own while diverting our attention and energy to something else, is the best bet.
Best bet; but like every bet, it’s harder to say if it’s a click. So all you can do is try to observe what your mind is telling you to do. If it asks you to calm down then calm down, if it asks you to query it then query it. All in all, practice the act of self-awareness to be able to pinpoint when it has started, then slowly tell yourself “it’s anxiety” and implore the systems you have in place to eradicate it from causing certain reactions. For example journaling, self-talk, therapy, praying, you name it…
One of the things I’ve learned to do when I’m extremely anxious is to take things slowly. As slowly/sluggish as it gets. No rushing or hurrying things to feel better.
Even it makes me slumber around the whole day and mismatch my daily activities. Other times it requires me to be overly active and goal-attaining in a way that energizes me to do a lot of things that will take my mind off it and ultimately make it go away — all while not denying it or trying to rid it.
Because again, Nick Wignall advised that labeling our emotions as either positive or negative might trigger us to act otherwise.
He asserted: that emotions are like dashboard signals trying to tell us something. And as mentioned earlier, obey your mind. Use your head. There’s a better approach to doing so.
Different tactics exist for different people who suffer from anxiety in managing it well. There are standard techniques, but at times it’s not as fruitful. Simply because, following some rules can be anxious-triggering, flouting anyone could make you feel all the more anxious. So the best thing is to pick one or two of something you’ve heard or learned works for your type and inculcate it together with your mind’s natural way of solving such difficult emotion when it arises. And I think you’ll be good, both now and in the future too.
I am a conscientious writer who is learning to turn her pain into purpose and look out for others as well through that means. Join me in this ardor-filled journey by subscribing to my account.
