When You Feel Anxiety
The emotion of anxiety is not something that needs to be fixed. The way that we manage anxiety needs to be set to rights.
You may feel anxiety mildly as butterflies in your stomach. But you might feel it more dramatically as a paralyzing fear. It is a negative expectation, and often shows up as nagging thoughts you try to control, but that little amygdala keeps it coming back at you.
What Is Anxiety?
To review last week’s Blog: Your Body of Anxiety, it means that you are in a mode of defense that has your brain, nervous system, blood pressure and hormones in high alert.
Such is anxiety. And more and more people are living with it in their everyday lives. As statistics show, the rates of anxiety have been rising steeply over the last decade, and more so over the past two years of controlling restrictions and lock-downs.
But anxiety has always been a part of human beings. So why is it now a chronic condition? What has changed?
Chronic Anxiety
If you keep chewing on your anxiety, you get more of it. You feel your anxiety deepening, and its tentacles stretch into more and more parts of your life. Those negative thoughts can become a dark drama that intensifies your anxiety. It becomes chronic.
When you feel overwhelmed by chronic anxiety, you just want to wipe it out, get rid of it, as if it is some external disease that has invaded your body. This kind of thinking makes you feel like there is no way out.
But, of course, there is always a way out.
Your Way Out
Your way out is not in trying to control events or things or people outside of you. Your anxiety is internal. Created inside of you. It is you and your reaction to events, things, people. The good news is that you have power over this. And your body is already trying to help you to pivot to a positive practice of dealing with it.
Know What Is Happening Inside Your Body
Remember dopamine? The feel-good hormone that spikes when an experience is pleasurable? Well, here it is again: anxiety actually produces higher levels of dopamine in your body.
This is important to know, because the ramifications are that the dopamine from anxiety can actually give you positive prospects and possibilities. Anxiety can actually help you!
Motivation from Anxiety
The emotion of anxiety is normal. However, the way that you cope with it may need some help.
The positive dopamine in your system is your Light > shining on your motivation. In physical and emotional terms, it prompts you to survive; then more, to live; and then more, to thrive.
Anxiety actually provides you with new thoughts and emotions. You feel them propelling you toward hope, then onward and upward to change, creating a new roadmap for yourself. Anxiety can promote a new, creative process for you, especially when you are in a problem-solving mode.
Experiencing Anxiety
When our daughter had what we eventually discovered was Chronic Fatigue, Immune Deficiency, it felt like there was no way out, and it would go on and on, forever. We were all anxious. But our anxiety kept us going, even when we felt empty and useless.
It turned out, our anxiety was a positive force, motivating us: to read and research, to hope, and plan, to find help, look into holistic support, discover and create new ideas in nutrition and cooking… and to persevere: to keep on keeping on.
Next week’s Blog will Deal with Anxiety with Your…
Light On!
