Anxiety Is Not Quarantined

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Anxiety is born with us. From the very first months of life to a ripe old age (if you're lucky) she will be there. This emotion is unpleasant for its uncertainty, it is experienced as tension and anxiety. With high intense anxiety, there may be discomfort in the body, such as headaches.

Despite its unpleasant properties, anxiety can very well become your friend. A kind of beacon in an incomprehensible and changing world. In the process of psychotherapy, people begin to understand what their anxiety is connected with and what it wants to say. Rather, not the anxiety itself, but your psyche as a whole. This emotion can arise as a reaction to the fact that you are doing something wrong. For example, in one client, anxiety was associated with a reaction to an unloved job and daily “overstepping”, which he tried to ignore.

Often, it is precisely such an unconscious anxiety associated with internal conflicts that leads to the psychotherapist's office. We now have enough external factors to stimulate anxiety. In an era of crisis and pandemic, it would seem that everyone should be alarmed, this is normal. Yes, indeed, normal. But another question is HOW do we worry? What is our concern? What internal conflicts did the crisis actualize in us?

Someone is afraid of getting infected and washes their hands much more than the WHO recommends. Another is anxious about nowhere to go for the weekend, isolation. Someone is afraid of losing their job, for whom it is a source of self-respect. There can be many options. The main thing is that everyone worries differently, based on their experience and personality. Questions of meanings, personal meaning of this or that event or fact - this is the road to understanding anxiety and, ultimately, the ability to be with it.

That's right, be. Do not wait for the anxiety to pass - this will only fix it in your head. Not to reject, but to accept and understand - this is what really helps to be anxious without suffering. But this is already much more difficult than understanding what it really is about. Anxiety tolerance is the ability to worry without disintegrating. This is exactly the case when anxiety from a Monster becomes a beacon that helps in life. After all, anxiety can protect against rash and dangerous actions. For example, in modern realities, she can force you to wear a mask, wash your hands, and self-isolate at home. Its presence can become understandable and its intensity acceptable.

Everyone has their own path to understanding anxiety, everyone chooses for himself whether he needs to understand it. Our brains have developed many ways to avoid this emotion, and that's great. Another question is that sometimes the old ways let us down or don't work. For example, now it is impossible to lead an intensive social life, for those who did this to “drown out” feelings is much more difficult than for those who “retreated into themselves”. It turned out that anxiety cannot be quarantined, but you have to learn to be with it. And that makes it interesting. How will we get out of there? What can we learn there? Do we learn something new about ourselves?