Anxiety

Anxiety is an emotional response to something we find threatening, in some way. It is an important survival mechanism, a part of our threat response system that we need. So why do some people suffer with it? The problem isn’t the anxiety, it’s the way we experience it.

Our relationship to the anxiety response can make it a useful warning flag or a distressing, limiting symptom. Really think about that for a minute… A warning system needs to be unpleasant to some extent to be useful. Fire alarms are not the nicest sounds for a very good reason, they have to quickly get our attention, regardless of how engaged we are in a given activity, and communicate danger. Anxiety serves a similar function, so it needs to be unpleasant enough for us to pay attention to the threat.

When this survival mechanism becomes distorted it can make the ‘alarm’ louder and much harder to turn off. It stops acting as an alarm system and becomes a problem that distracts from the threat. This can often form the basis of a self sustaining cycle where the original threat is overlooked as we pay attention to the anxiety and therefore continues triggering it.

There are lots of ways our survival mechanisms can become distorted and there are lots of ways we can address this distortion and recalibrate, bringing our responses back under control. For these strategies to become integrated as part of a new version of ourselves, one that does not struggle with anxiety, the underlying cause has to be acknowledged and addressed.

A quick and effective way to ease some of the anxiety is through the body. By soothing the physical responses, we can ease some of the emotional and mental components of anxiety. Breathing exercises, calming practices like meditation and yoga are all really helpful. Challenging our anxious thoughts can be useful too.

Sharing our anxiety is another useful tool in the anxiety management kit. Being able to have our fears acknowledged by some one who does not judge us for them is incredibly healing.

Managing anxiety involves changing our relationship to it, empowering ourselves to be in control of engaging and disengaging with it. Most importantly, we stop being the person who is afraid of their own emotional responses. Working on anxiety can seem daunting, but finding a way to rest easy in ourselves is worth the effort.