Anxiety
What is anxiety and how can you overcome it.
What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is a mental tool designed to predict future danger and warn us about it. The ideal use of anxiety would be to anticipate danger in the future and take corrective actions now to prevent it. However, it often gets out of control and causes the negative anxiety most of us are familiar with.
Anxiety often focuses on you and typically an insecurity you have. You may not have confidence in yourself as a person or certain aspects of yourself. This may be socially or achievement-based e.g social anxiety or anxiety over a test based on your ability.
Anxiety focuses on the future sometimes it may seem that it is based on something that previously happened. E.g if you did something embarrassing the previous day you may be feeling anxious but this is over the consequences that could evolve in the future. We are not anxious over the past.
How we respond to anxiety
When we experience anxiety we try to remove the uncertainty of the future that the anxiety is about. eg a coping method for social anxiety over a party may be to not go to the party at all. This removes all uncertainty and returns control back to you. This may seem like a good thing but it restricts the amount of things you can do as many of the positive things in life aren’t in your complete control.
Solution
As anxiety is based on future events a way of combating it is to bring the mind to the present. This could be through meditation particularly an ego or focus meditation. An example of this could be when you have a hot shower, bath or any other immersive activity you will notice that you won’t be thinking about other things except the present. This makes our anxiety melt away as we are so concentrated on the moment. However, things such as substances are not good options for focusing on the moment and removing anxiety. It is also important to try immersing yourself in the activity that you are anxious about. An example of this is stage fright, often peoples “fear” dissipates when they are actually on stage as they are immersed in the activity. To summarise if we can train our mind to be in the present it is a place where anxiety can not exist.
Anxiety comes from insecurity. When you cross the road you are faced with the uncertainty and possibility of being hit by a car. However, you most likely do this without thinking. You don’t know what could happen but you have confidence in yourself to face this uncertainty.
A way to work on anxiety is to focus on the insecurities that the anxiety is rooted in and solve them. Confidence comes from acting in the face of uncertainty. Therefore every time you back down or avoid certain situations due to anxiety you are sacrificing the opportunity to build confidence while also giving more power to your anxiety. This means that the control we often seek when trying to “solve” anxiety is reducing our confidence, the key tool in battling anxiety, therefore, making it worse.
