Anxiety: The Hidden Opportunity

Let’s talk about anxiety for a moment. Apart from the chemical factors in the brain and elsewhere in the body that are already known to be associated with it (various hormones and neurotransmitters being out of balance, such as epinephrine/norepinephrine, dopamine, serotonin, adrenaline, cortisol, glutamate, or gamma-aminobutyric acid), there are also a handful of lifestyle components directly linked to our personal choices with regards to diet, fitness, detox, and mental coping mechanisms affecting our ability to handle anxiety in ways that would prevent it from drastically reducing the quality of our lives.

Some people spend a good portion of their time on visiting doctors and acquiring one diagnosis after another for months and years. Those diagnosed with some kind of an anxiety disorder represent a considerable segment of the US population (over 40 million adults or about a fifth of the adult population) and, of course, we are told that anxiety is largely overlooked in the rest and, therefore, underdiagnosed. In addition, at least half of these adults have opted to take prescription drugs to help them reduce their anxiety. That way, they’ve basically accepted their “fate” and use the pills as crutches. Having thus officially established their unwell status, they also often get the additional benefit of other people’s attention, sympathy, and indulgence through willingness to offer a listening ear or two.

Others take a different approach to dealing with their anxiety by shutting themselves off to any news or events that can potentially arouse it. This attitude is also known as burying your head in the sand (no, ostriches don’t do that, contrary to popular belief), in the hope of shielding yourself from reality and preventing stress from further plaguing your life. It leads to willful ignorance on multiple levels with regards to major aspects of well-being while keeping yourself detached and deprived of various opportunities to make a better life for yourself and others. Many ultra-powerful institutions — governments and corporate entities alike — rely heavily on people who deliberately pay no attention to what goes on around them to promote and impose policies, services, and financial arrangements that would be less likely to come to fruition otherwise. To make matters worse, those same people assiduously hiding from bad news show even more persistence in ignoring their own problems for indefinitely extended time periods. By falsely suppressing their anxiety that constantly keeps creeping up on them as a result of routinely not addressing important issues in their lives, they create an additional psychological challenge — a lasting nagging feeling of personal inadequacy and insufficiency, which takes even longer time and harder effort to overcome than the anxiety itself.

Yet others who, for ‘whatever’ reason, are the least popular and least talked about, choose a method towards anxiety that is different from taking pills, pursuing sympathy, or hiding their heads under the sand in order to know as little about the rest of the world as humanly possible and keep themselves from worrying too much. That third category of individuals is what I want to discuss here today. You can make up your mind at any time as to which group you belong into, how satisfied you feel by being where you currently are, and where you would rather be and what you can or will do to get there.

A problem-solver knows that anxiety can be used in several ways or it can use you in several ways. You can use it to gain attention, hide from problems, and avoid certain obligations and responsibilities; or you can partner up with your anxiety and think of it as an opportunity to grow. The most successful people are those who’ve learned how to do an excellent job at handling multiple responsibilities by partnering up with their anxieties in the development of strong coping mechanisms that they utilize in every challenging situation in order to preserve their focus and get the job done in the best way they can. To be clear, this is a skill to be mastered throughout life, but when it starts with a clear purpose in mind, the so-called journey becomes a source of inspiration and self-motivation that those who choose to let their anxiety take control over their lives can hardly imagine, let alone appreciate.

To a self-motivated individual in pursuit of success and high accomplishment, anxiety is simply a tool. It is a tool for personal accountability, a tool that propels them to take action rather than procrastinate, and a tool that reminds them to never become complacent by taking anything for granted at any level of their success. This is what partnering up with anxiety is all about. Make it an ally instead of a foe by first understanding where it comes from and identifying the factors that cause it.

While some anxiety-provoking factors or events are best avoided once we’ve determined that they don’t contribute to our personal growth, others are largely our responsibility to handle. Those other factors are the ones we should prioritize because they are under our control and, by constantly refusing to take action, we accomplish nothing more than sabotaging ourselves through cumulative self-inflicted damage to our self-esteem from being in denial of our poor choices and from resenting those around us who are consistently successful. That is the most counterproductive approach to anxiety, which, ironically, also tends to be the most common choice of “action” for too many people. Seeing it happen over and over is frustrating because it doesn’t make their lives easier or more enjoyable in any way. Yet, again and again, they prefer it to the proactive approach, which, with some practice and discipline, would allow them to lead lives that are by far more enjoyable and fulfilling!

There is simply no comparison between feeling debilitated and completely incapacitated by your anxiety and feeling motivated, curious, and ambitious because of it! Which state of mind or being would you prefer long term? One is about indulgence, and the other is about taking control. One calls for no effort on your part, whereas the other requires you to stop complaining and start working on yourself instead.

Is the ‘upper’ end tough to reach? If you’re on the lower end at present, you bet it can be tough to reverse your thought pattern! Why? Because the reversal process is most effective when implemented while you feel anxious, provided that you remember about applying it during that same moment. Anger management operates on the same principle. These strong emotions — fear, anxiety, and anger — are best handled during their peaks if you wish to create a lasting confidence in your ability to turn around an emotional process that takes control over you otherwise. This method is not easy, but it is more efficient than first trying to suppress the emotion before it blows up. If you become successful at reversing anxiety at its peak ten or twenty times in a row, the skill to reverse it earlier and earlier in the process will then come to you more naturally, because you have already affirmed more than ten times that you are capable of dealing with this monster at its worst. This is the shortest trajectory to overcoming and controlling anxiety.

Once this reversal mental process is accomplished, anxiety is no longer an inner enemy. Rather, it is a useful tool, an instrument of opportunity to further build mental and emotional strength that is now under your control!