“Do not let your difficulties fill you with anxiety; after all, it is only in the darkest nights that stars shine more brightly.”
Ali Ibn Abi Talib
You may not believe this right now but your anxiety is actually a gift. It’s letting you know whenever there is something out of alignment in your internal reality. See we are living in uncertain times and it’s a common, natural, and emotional response to feel anxiety in response to uncertainty. But anxiety is still a solvable problem and in order to solve any problem we first must be able to isolate exactly what that problem is for us is our internal space.
If you don’t have any context for what anxiety is and what your root causes are? You are going to feel very helpless about it. But there is always a cause. It’s just occurring at the subconscious level. So sometimes we are not aware of it. And what your anxiety is trying to do this entire time is poke at you and prod you awake. So you can start looking beneath the surface at what those root causes are?
Anxiety; the bundle of fears.
Imagine that you are a child and you have this huge fear of a monster under your bed. So every day you come into your room and go running to your bed and jump over it. So the monster can’t grab your legs and maybe one day you work up the courage to just look under your bed and you see nothing there. Your anxiety vanishes. All these things we have been afraid of and avoiding this entire time and trying to repress and stay away from when we actually looked there is nothing to be afraid of. This is exactly how anxiety works. It is actually a symptom of a buildup of unresolved problems bubbling beneath the surface in your subconscious mind. Your brain is designed to complete life experiences and it’s trying to bring these unresolved problems to the surface through the emotion of anxiety.
Lack Of Resolution.
It sees a lack of resolution of problems as an impudent to survival. Imagine that thousands of years ago, you are trying to make your way through life and survive. You can’t afford to have unresolved problems and our brain structures haven’t changed that much over the course of thousands of years. Our brain is still trying to do the same thing. It’s trying to get us to take a really clear look at anything that’s holding us back in our lives and create proper strategies and solutions to work through them.
“I promise you nothing is as chaotic as it seems. Nothing is worth diminishing your health. Nothing is worth poisoning yourself into stress, anxiety, and fear.”– Steve Maraboli
Steve Maraboli
Just imagine you are going throughout your day right now and maybe you are late to work. And you start fearing that your boss is going to be angry at you, or your colleagues are going to judge you. And then you get to work and get busy and you forget about those fears. But they get repressed into the subconscious. Later on, we may get into another fear and this goes on.
An Emotional Residue.
We can go through the course of our day and have all these fears that are coming to the surface. All of these perceptions and stories, and if we don’t work through them and create resolution for them or think them all the way through they just get stored in the subconscious and they become that monster under your bed. And that monster will get louder and louder until you go in their and take a look and create resolution.
Think of your anxiety as being the emotional residue of built-up unresolved problems that are accumulating throughout the course of your day. And that anxiety is a monster trying to yell at you, trying to bring those problems to the surface so you can solve them and survive.
Building Blocks Of Anxiety.
There are always two things going on. One is pain and then there is suffering. Our pain is our unmet need and our suffering is the story we tell around the unmet needs. It’s what we make the unmet needs mean. So, to resolve anxiety, we have to change our thinking and we have to meet our needs
Imagine you wake up and watch the news and you think everything is out of control( like the current pandemic situation). This chaos is never-ending. These thoughts are the story of your life. The story you tell around your unmet needs and when you have these passing thoughts. Throughout the day your subconscious mind buys into these passing thoughts and it seems them as absolute truth at that moment. It creates an emotional response accordingly. Think of it for a moment.
What feelings do you feel when you think thoughts about your life out of control and chaos all around you? In that single moment, you are living in a reality where you truly have no control over your life. Your subconscious mind believes all the thoughts you think as if they are completely real and valid.
How Does Your Anxiety Build Up?
It’s simply the bundle of thoughts of fears we feel throughout the day. We have to deal with the couple of things. We have to change our thinking and we have to meet our needs. If you are changing your thinking you might say something like, “Yeah, there is a lot of uncertainty right now, but I trust that I can grow and adapt. In fact, I always have.” And when you want to meet your needs around this, you would go, “Okay, I feel like I don’t have a need met for control. How can I create control in my life? Maybe I can make a schedule for my self. Set intentions for my day or I can observe and reframe my thinking to gain more control over my emotional state.”
“You don’t have to control your thoughts. You just have to stop letting them control you.”
Dan Millman
Change The Thinking Process.
Do you see we just keep changing our thinking and we keep meeting our needs? These painful ways of perceiving your reality, focusing on a problem instead of finding the solution. This is what’s out of alignment and anxiety is that monster. It keeps speaking to you, trying to prompt you to change your thinking and to meet your needs. It’s trying to communicate to you the entire time. Anxiety is this gift. It’s asking you to pivot into your internal reality, asking you to adapt so that you can get your needs met and release the story you are telling yourself by changing your thinking.
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