Battling With Anxiety

This is what the Merck Medical Manual says about battling with anxiety:

“Anxieties are a normal response to a threat or to psychological stress and they’re experienced occasionally by everyone. Normal anxiety has its roots in fear and serves an important survival function. However, where anxiety symptoms persist and become long-erm then it can develop into a disorder.”

This helps to see where the line is drawn medically in order to understand more about what is part of the human condition, because we all have our off-days right, and what may be detrimental in as much as it stops us from achieving our wonderful potential.

People often use one term or the other, and seem to be pretty much the same thing, as far as our general referencing goes? Anxiety does sit underneath many closely related conditions, which in my view equates to long-term stress. For me it feels like a quivering nervous element that feels a little out of my control but what is it like for you?

Anxiety Is Common Enough

Anxiety is very common, because the nervous system is always switched on, but depending on the sort of household you grew up in you may like me have learned to be on red-alert, nervous and jumpy. I remember being humiliated in public by a parent, and a friend’s parent who would make me feel small with snarky comments about how I was dressed, where being brought up to be polite, etc, meant I had no rebuke. Anxiety is a natural response to anything that makes us uncomfortable, but shows itself through events and the habits we adopt to hide it or super-sensitive to:

• Stressful situations
• Social anxiety
• Bullish people
• Public speaking
• Smoking
• Drinking
• Compulsions
  

It Can Start At Anytime

Being in the flow, only happens when we’re relaxed, feeling centred and calm, living in the flow (of life), when all is well and everything clicks into place. Running just as it should, the anxiety has nothing to latch onto. But anxiety is real and it perpetuates itself, it can erupt at any time. Perhaps yours occurs in certain situations, due to a former experience (or trigger) where you find a pattern of anxiety pushes through, staking it’s claim for what seem like a myriad of reasons:

• Meeting new people
• Giving presentations
• Trying something new
• Something someone says
• Dealing with something you’ve been putting off
• Just the thoughts of doing something that is expected of you
  

How Did Yours Get Started?

Even when you can’t remember what started it, over time it contributes towards a set triggers and tracks that once traced back to the originating moment is finable and stoppable. The impact of carrying on with it helps you latch onto it, even expect it, because bonkersly it’s helping you stay within the comfort zone that feels safe, only due to its familiarity.

Of course it’s different for everyone, but one of life’s challenges is to find the edge (which changes all the time). That place where comfort meets the unknown because you can grow from this and learn to handle even more of the uncomfortable.

It’s where you, your work and what you teach your kids about meeting life head on. Informing your work allows more depth through your lived experiences, which are not for nought. And if you’re an anxious parent that brings it’s own imprint that your kids pick up on, or already have if they’ve been developing their own issues.

It’s not to point any fingers, especially when you also learned to feel and be this way due to how, what and where you learned yours from. But the good news is, is that you can break the cycle.