In our last blog, we briefly touched on anxiety in relation to stress, that was to compare them. This time let’s really look at anxiety and why it affects so many of us. Anxiety is the real or imagined worry about a problem. I know this sounds too simplistic, but that’s because society made it more difficult than it needs to be. Anxiety really is the emotional and physical response to “worry” which is often routed in a fear.
Now you might be reading this and say “Pete I have nothing to fear but (spiders/snakes/heights)” you know the ones that mess with even the biggest and strongest of men. Well I’m talking about even bigger fears, and I’ll provide a few examples to assist.
Let’s look at a simple road trip, maybe you have a family, on this road trip you begin to feel the stress of it all and start to think “I hope there isn’t any problems with the reservations” (I don’t know if this has happened to you, but it has me!). This thought is the beginning of anxious distress in our scenario. You know the room was booked/paid for, so why even have the thought, because you’re afraid. Maybe you’re afraid you made a mistake (pretty scary), maybe you’re afraid the idiot at check-in screwed up or someone else made a mistake (really scary), or maybe you’re afraid the universe conspired against you and the internet lost your booking in its tangled web or in some other way life just wasn’t fair today (terrifying).
(In a future post I will further break these three fear constructs down, but for today let’s just roll with the assumption that we don’t want them to happen.)
All of these are imagined concerns which create the same response of stress, but in this situation no way to fix the problem because there isn’t one. You’re literally suffering in your imagination. Yes, all those things can and do happen, but they haven’t happened yet, you are imagining them and getting upset by them and this ladies and gentlemen is the real problem with anxiety, it is within us and tied to nothing external, no matter how much we want to tie it to someone or something causing it, we are the problem.
If you made it this far then you have some curiosity or some acceptance about anxiety being our own battle and nothing but us can fix it, so how do we. Well, you can use all the tips from the stress blog linked here, but the real way to win this fight is through rational argument with ourselves. Yes, like a maniac talking to themselves in the car, but I recommend writing it out in a journal, piece of paper, hell a receipt will do. Why, because our rational brain struggles to convince us of our imagined world when presented with evidence it can visually see. I use the prior example of the hotel to illustrate.
Example of a way to write out the argument:
Anxious Fear: There may be a problem with the reservation, we will be stranded with nowhere to sleep!
Rational evaluation: Is there any reason to believe there is a problem with my reservation?
Evidence Gathering: Yes, these mistakes happen all the time!
Evidence evaluation: Is there any evidence it has happened this time?
Evidence Gathering: No, but what if it does?
Solution options based on evidence gathered: Well, I can take care of it when we get there, or I guess I can call ahead to see if there are any issues.
Poof, anxiety reduced, because your rational brain has identified the problem, evaluated the risk and developed an action plan. You can do the evidence gather/evaluate steps as many times as needed, most times its rather quick, you see its irrational and you develop a rational plan. That’s why I recommend writing it out and giving it a try to see if it helps.