Dealing With Anxiety

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

We live in an age of anxiety. The human brain is designed in such a way that it protects us from dangers, always. Nature has laid the instinct for self-preservation. This mechanism is so ancient that it continues to protect us from mammoths. Since then, life has changed slightly, and now, instead of mammoths, we scare ourselves. Quite a few people have succeeded in this, as evidenced by the increase in anxiety disorders.

Generally speaking, anxiety is necessary, it helps to navigate. But sometimes it becomes superfluous, it is also called neurotic. The person exaggerates the danger, the emotion of anxiety captures him. Let's talk about her. It is generally accepted that anxiety does not have an object, but it is, it is just that consciousness does not always see the chain of feelings and thoughts leading to it. However, the body's response is obvious. It is always an internal tension.

On the way of growing up, a person learns how everything works. He faces different people, situations. In this interaction, reactions are developed, which are fixed and become stereotypes of behavior. Family values, psychological trauma, growing up difficulties - all these determine behavior. Negative emotions are indispensable. If you want to experience pleasant feelings, then the unpleasant person does not accept, tries not to notice or suppresses. The easiest way to do this is not to get into such a situation, so avoidance becomes the main feature of behavior. The lesson from adversity is not to change behavior, but to avoid it. The thought of facing difficulties again raises unsettling expectations. This is how anxiety appears, then it is reinforced and becomes a personality trait. An anxious person is always on the alert. He knows exactly how to avoid anxiety. Instead of an airplane, you can go by train, the fear of elevators makes you walk up the stairs. Difficulties are also possible in relationships, so it is better to wait for an ideal partner who does not appear in any way. There are as many examples of avoidance as there are fears. And all would be nothing, but the vacation at the dacha is boring, and you still want a relationship. The wiggle room shrinks. Restrictions are imposed on desires. Self-contact decreases and anxiety increases.

All anxious people have something in common: they doubt their ability to cope with circumstances, their ability to adapt to a new situation for themselves, and over time, already in a familiar one. This is because they are not used to trusting their feelings, primarily unpleasant ones, such as shame, guilt, fear. Feelings are a management tool. He tells us what we are doing wrong, what needs to be changed next time. What I mean. For example, a conflict at work with a colleague who behaved ugly. A mixture of anger, resentment, helplessness arose, which the person tried to hide or, they say, swallowed. I didn’t realize and didn’t react. Now the need for contact with a colleague creates anxiety. Feelings tell you where the weak points are. Anger speaks of a violation of personal boundaries, which he did not notice in time, resentment about a wrong assessment of the situation and unjustified expectations, helplessness about a lack of understanding of one's capabilities. This is a guide to changing your reactions, learning. Of course, you can run away, close, but there will be more anxiety, because last time I failed. And already she begins to determine behavior. Question: what if …? But what if…? a person asks himself ten times a day, he checks several times whether he has turned off the gas, distrust of the body forces him to go to the doctors. This is how anxiety disorders develop.

In order to get ready for trouble or avoid meeting them, you need to control as much as possible. And this becomes one of the main strategies of an anxious person's behavior. In general, this is logical when it comes to a dangerous trip to the mountains or a walk in the forest, where there are many hungry wolves. But those go to the mountains for whom strong sensations are only a joy, and wolves usually do not associate with people, especially anxious ones.

In ordinary life, everything is simpler, and we worry about the simplest things that are not dangerous or the degree of danger is greatly exaggerated. This mainly concerns social relations. This is where our alarm is, and not at all in the night forest. This is not surprising, there are a lot of people around, the competition is great, it is becoming more and more difficult to find your place in society.

Anything can be dangerous. An anxious person is simply in the mood for trouble. Of all the possible scenarios for the development of events, he will choose the worst and come up with a promising continuation, the same catastrophic one.

"If I don't pass the exam, then they will definitely be expelled", "if we part, then life will end." He prepares "straw" for himself, it seems to him that it will be impossible to endure a bad result without such psychological preparation. "I knew it!" - a kind of support and praise for yourself. And if everything is not so bad, then you can get pleasure from the fact that the worst thing happened. In both cases, there is a positive bonus. "All good things must be paid for", "life is full of dangers", "nothing is given for free" - such attitudes provide anxiety and constant mobilization. It requires tremendous energy, but the forces are not unlimited, and the body reacts with prostration, and then depression..

Such is the gloomy picture. Can anxiety be dealt with? Can! You need to start with motivation. And, as practice shows, this is a very difficult moment. It is not easy to understand and articulate the perspectives of life without anxiety. We'll have to give up the habits of anxiety, hide-and-seek games with oneself. Now, albeit not very much, it is tested and safe, and the new is always scary. A person gets so used to anxiety that without it it is already anxious. It is embedded in thoughts and behavior, it becomes a habit. A person cannot imagine his life as easy and positive, because he is simply afraid. Such is the paradox.

We get used to living in an automatic mode. This is both good and bad. It’s good, because you don’t have to think every time how to get to work or what to answer to the boss when he yells, this has happened many times, the reactions and behaviors have become automatic. Bad, because automatisms are everywhere, including in anxious behavior. Anxiety occurs when triggers appear - moments that resemble trouble, and the reaction to them is also automatic, despite the fact that the situation may not be dangerous. And so every day … every year … Have you ever wondered why many people like to travel? This is an intuitive attempt to emerge from automatisms. The situation makes you include sensations, emotions and feelings appear, reality becomes bright and interesting. Anxious thoughts recede, they are supplanted by feelings.

Listen to them. Be attentive to anxiety, observe the manifestations of this emotion, be in it. It seems like it is intolerable, but it is not. After a short time, after you focus your attention on it, it will begin to weaken. It takes awareness to understand what is happening to you. Are your anxious thoughts really real, or are you just used to thinking that way? You need to track your avoidance. How do you do it? What does your automatism look like? What alternative could there be? You run away so as not to feel, but you need to accept and experience it, then next time you will not need to run away. An alarm warns of danger. But for an anxious person, it is like a supersensitive car alarm that haunts the owner, day or night. You can change the settings of an alarm, a person also has a mechanism for settings, these are feelings. By suppressing them, you become uncontrollable.

Attempting to control is usually a psychological defense. It seems that the more information, the calmer, but this is an illusion. You can only control what depends on you. You can always figure this out by asking yourself a simple question: can I influence this? If the answer is "no", then you have to let go, control has no sense. This is the voice of fear, it will drain you energetically and nothing else will change from this attempt to control.

Attention is an effective tool for mindfulness. It is it that helps to switch from anxious thoughts to feelings in order to better understand oneself, to establish an internal dialogue that will help to understand the unconscious motives of anxiety. This will help to look at the anxiety from the side, how to emerge from it, calm down.

Anxiety narrows the mind, the world seems dangerous. But look at how others react to these dangers, you will see that most of them are only in your mind. It's just that something went wrong there once, and almost always it can be fixed.