Is Anxiety Scaring You?
Have you ever felt all your insecurities, past mistakes and regrets all at the same time? Do you worry that a repeat of a horrible situation is bound to happen any day now? Can’t find a steady state of peace of mind and ruminating about your personal fears and worries? If so, you’ve likely experienced anxiety.
While there are well to do definitions for what anxiety is, I like to explain it as feeling like you are losing control when in reality you are not. Anxiety can be a scary. The voices in your head and everything in your body are telling you that your personal world is falling apart.
I often get asked, “How do I stop myself from feeling anxious?” The honest answer is—there’s no unequivocal assured answer to this question. Anxiety is personal. It is often shaped by your subjective experiences and the epi-genetics factors dating back to your childhood.
While much time and attention is given to the negative impact of anxiety, it is equally important to identify the value or positive opportunities of anxiety. You might discover that your efforts to win the fight against “stop feeling anxious” urge isn’t diminishing your anxiety. Instead, you are experiencing an uptick in fear-based emotions—Your mind and thinking are all over the place and you can’t stop the constant flow of worry and anxiety.
What to Do When Anxiety Shows Up?
Accepting the anxiety when it shows up is an effective approach for overcoming and regaining control over emotional discomforts. This allows you to shift your focus from a state of hyper-arousal; otherwise known as triggers or your stress responses (fight, flight or freeze).
Anxiety isn’t all bad. Anxiety can teach you valuable lessons about yourself. For instance, what are you ignoring and anxiety is warning you to pay attention to? Is it that you are avoiding your personal goals and allowing limiting beliefs to hold you back from your calling? Again, anxiety isn’t all bad. Sometimes it washes up to help motivate you to begin healing the gaping holes in our emotions. God sometimes uses anxiety to motivate or nudge us to take important actions.
What Should I know about Anxiety?
Anxiety is both a feeling and condition. Feeling anxious is best described as the day to day worries, nervousness and what if thoughts that pop up in your head from day to day. They are short-lived, not hardwired, do not take up much mental space and tend to bounce back to your normative standards of living.
However, the conditioned to anxiety is quite different. The polarity between the feeling anxious and having a condition of anxiety can be explained as a clinical disorder, as evidence by an imbalance in functioning, duration of symptoms, and inability to harness control over fear.
Anxiety brings other associated fear-mongering emotions (isolation, loneliness, feelings of abandonment, for example). It is not uncommon to feel controlled, stuck, sensationalized, and loathed with despair. Anxiety left untreated is known to have far reaching affects which includes instability, relationship conflicts and significant disconnections in areas of connectivity, spirituality, emotional health and self-care.
Anxiety can feel like an annoying voice that pesters and refuses to be quieted. It brings up memories from the past and threatens the future by inserting what ifs at the beginning of every thought…(What if…you lose your job? What if…You get COVID-19? What if….He really doesn’t love you? What if…something bad happens to you?— who’ll be there for you? These thoughts then produce sensations and lead to unhealthy behaviors in which avoidance is chief. And before you realize it, your thinking becomes reinforced to believe that you are held hostage by fear, anxiety, and panic (as though it were true).
Letting Go of Anxiety
Philippians 4:6 Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.
This scripture is an effective method for dealing with anxiety. The approach involves stepping into action and adapting the principle of a healthy emotional mindset: prayer, petition, request and thanksgiving.
Be anxious for nothing— don’t be afraid of anxiety and its sensations. You are likely to experience palpitations, chest pain or pressure, sweaty palms, shortness of breath and other physiological symptoms. These feelings are uncomfortable but not dangerous. When anxiety is present, don’t get caught in the rabbit hole of unnecessary expectations—“I shoulds” and “shouldn’ts”.
Spend time knowing the truth about what and how you’re feeling. Acknowledge that fear has arise and begin to pray about it. Prayer allows us to share what we are feeling with God who has the highest authority in our lives. When you pray, you avoid the pitfall of trying to stop fear from coming or try push it away by our own ingenuity.
Instead, embrace the discomfort and allow the process (praying through your anxiety) to reveal what needs to be improved in your life. Petition and request are about asking for help and being clear. Sometimes, the help you need involves the support of a professional mental health therapist to help you commit to the journey of emotional healing.
Finally practicing thanksgiving is another key principle highlighted in Philippians 4:6. Gratitude is a thanksgiving tool that allows you to focus on what is true vs what if.
It’s easy to get saddled in feeling afraid and crippled by powerlessness. Overcoming anxiety requires pushing yourself to stay present and tender to yourself. Anxiety can be managed, controlled and with the right level of supportive help, you can learn how to use anxiety to improve your life and sense of purpose.
