Anxiety – Are You Thriving Or Just Surviving?

When people ask me how I am, I normally respond with “good thanks, and you?” which I believe is a natural response that a lot of us have. The thing is, it removes the focus from us, straight onto the other person.  Some days the answer is true and I am actually having a great day, other days I can’t say it quick enough or my strong facade may be broken.

Anxiety

Anxiety itself is an interesting thing to explore, the more you explore it, the more you thrive from it. While my above answer takes the other persons focus off me, my focus on my problems remain – I am just surviving: living purely to not die; which isn’t really living.

The thing is, we will never actually get rid of anxiety – and we wouldn’t want to either. See, anxiety is a great tool that helps keep us safe, tells us that something is wrong and we need to deal with it.

Consider an alarm clock – you set it for the time that you need to wake up, you want to hear it otherwise you might be late. Though you fall into such a deep, peaceful, (rare) sleep – then you hear the noise, it sounds like a truck is backing into your bedroom and it is getting louder and louder. Then you realise it is just your alarm clock, but the clock has been knocked down by your thrashing arms and you can’t find it to switch off. You become more alert and agitated, focused only on finding the one thing that will switch it off.

Anxiety is our natural alarm clock that goes off when it needs to and it won’t stop until we find the off button. Though the off button can be different each and every time.

Dr Russ Harris from ACT Mindfully encourages us to carefully observe our strong feelings as though we were a scientist, to be mindful of all its different properties.  Anxiety may only show up at different times depending on the cause, though if we are just trying to hit that off button, we only get the snooze and it keeps coming back on whenever a trigger is present.

By carefully observing it, we can notice patterns such as:

• time
• places
• people
• thoughts and so on

Once we find the cause, we can then explore how best to attend to that need and then we can actually thrive from it, not just survive with it.

Sources:

Jessica Mannion – Assistant Director – Diploma – Distance Education Program (DEP).
Grad. Cert. in Family Therapy, Grad Member CCAA, Provisional Member PACFA – 22436

If you experience anxiety talk to your GP or talk to a qualified counsellor.

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