How to make anxiety work for you
And not let it drag you down
So what?
Emotions that are natural to our body and mind are meant to help us and our body and mind are designed to cope and deal with them. One of the natural emotions is anxiety. Whilst they are innate to our existence, prolonged anxiety increases your risk of heart disease and lead to depression amongst other things. We can’t turn off anxiety but we can quieten it and make it work for us. Let’s find out how.
Learn its effects
Like with anything important and worth learning in life, we have to invest our time and effort to find out what anxiety is and how it impacts you. This starts with finding out what causes you to feel anxious. Anxiety, often times, causes elevated heart rate, increase in breathing and queasy feeling in your digestive system and/or reproductive organs as blood is pulled away from these parts of your body. Knowing these symptoms will allow you to pinpoint what causes your anxiety to occur and how anxiety impacts you. Knowing these important aspects of anxiety will not only make you empathetic with those around you, you help yourself by becoming self-aware and being able to manage your triggers.
Be productive
Once you know what anxiety feels like for you, make a list of things you feel anxious and worried about. Ask yourself what actions you can take as you go through the list. When you are triggered and become anxious, take the action that you matched to the things on your list. You become action-oriented with your anxiety by pairing an action to one of your triggers. This simple trick turns your anxiety into you becoming productive.
My experience
I’ve always been a doer. When I was anxious, I would find things to fill time and keep myself busy. This made me productive but made me insensitive to how I was feeling. Nowadays, my “action” and first port of call is to stop and breathe. Breathing exercises allow me to reduce the effects of anxiety, manage my reactions to it and, best of all, help me be more present and mindful around those that I love (i.e. my family).
What now?
- What do you do when you get anxious? Do you have any effective methods of managing anxiousness? We’re keen to hear all about it!
- Start making a list of things that cause anxiety and pair it with an action to better manage your anxiety.