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Anxiety can be a nasty beast. Overcoming anxiety requires feeling your feelings, acknowledging the fear, identifying the root cause, pushing through the pain, and breaking the cycle despite your fear. This can be challenging, but totally worth it if you truly want to live a happier and more productive life.
Listen to the Chronically Conscious podcast and keep reading below to learn how to overcome anxiety naturally.
1. Feel your feelings.
- The lifeboat could sink on its way over.
- It could explode!
- Or run out of gas…
- They could get lost and never find me.
- The wrong person might be rescued by mistake.
- Maybe they don’t speak English and they won’t understand me.
- I’ll look like a ragamuffin by the time they find me (if they find me).
- The sharks could be on their way too.
- I could drown before I get rescued.
Meanwhile, you’re drowning—drowning in a whole lot of “what ifs.”
“I’ve had a lot of worries in my life, most of which never happened.”
– Mark Twain
You’re looking at the tip of the iceberg, but you feel like you’re drowning in the ocean. You want to call out for help, but you keep thinking of all of the things that could go wrong with the lifeboat, or to you while you’re waiting for it.
Okay, so maybe some (or more likely, none) of those “what ifs” will actually happen, but try overcoming anxiety when it feels like you’re imploding and exploding at the same time. Thoughts racing at a mile a minute, but you can’t move.
Impossible?
You might think this (goodness knows, you’re great at thinking), but it’s simply not so…
“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
– Nelson Mandela
2. Acknowledge the fear.
That’s how anxiety feels. But sometimes we can get so caught up in our feelings, that we lose sight of what those feelings represent.
The dictionary definition of anxiety is:
“apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness usually over an impending or anticipated ill”
– Merriam-Webster Dictionary
In clinical terms:
“anxiety is a mental health disorder characterized by feelings of worry or fear that are strong enough to interfere with one’s daily activities.”
– Mayo Clinic
Put very simply… anxiety is fear.
Let me repeat that—anxiety is fear. Realizing this is one of the keys to overcoming anxiety.
In my tips for reversing disease and embracing life, I describe how fear starts in the mind and manifests itself in the body as adverse symptoms. Anyone who’s ever experienced anxiety knows this could be the fear of a lot of different things:
- The unknown
- Failure
- Rejection
- Health issues
- Not reaching our potential
Or, very often, anxiety is fearing all of these things…at the same time. (That’s called generalized anxiety disorder).
3. Identify the root cause.
Anxiety runs in my family. My mom is a chronic worrier. I grew up surrounded by anxiety. It was in my blood, so I thought it was normal.
FYI—having a panic attack while getting ready for work is NOT normal. Also, wanting to die while experiencing this panic attack, simply because you don’t want to incur a hospital bill, is also NOT normal. Getting mad at your husband for taking you to he hospital is definitely NOT normal. (*NOTE* the funeral would have cost more than the hospital visit!)
^^^ True story. For me, at least.
Blame it on genetics or the power of association, but there’s no excuse for not overcoming anxiety. Ultimately, we’re each responsible for our own behavior.
Long before I learned the 6 C’s central to my attitude of gratitude, my anxiety started out in comparison mode (not being as good as those around me). This turned into fear of failure (not being perfect), which turned into thinking of everything that could go wrong so I could have a long list of excuses not to try in the first place.
Fear of failure, fear of not being enough…
Sound familiar?
It’s the “perfect” recipe for disaster…at the very least, a crippling case of perfectionism.
What I didn’t realize was that by worrying about what could go wrong, instead of trying to find solutions to what was actually wrong (or better yet, focusing on what was going right!), I was creating the very problems I worried about.
It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy—the power of the spoken word.
If words are so powerful, why not use them for good instead of anxiety? Try some positive affirmations, which I also talk about in my journey to self-acceptance.
You can get to the root cause of your anxiety quickly with the Anxiety Remedy.
4. Push through the pain.
You have the fear, you know you have the fear, and you know how you got the fear, so now what?
You have to work through it.
Dale Carnegie’s self-help book, How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, outlines the “magic formula” to overcoming anxiety:
- Ask yourself, “What is the worst that can possibly happen?”
- Prepare to accept it if you have to.
- Then calmly proceed to improve on the worst.
The word “magic” seems a bit mystical to me, but I’ve found this strategy to be incredibly helpful in overcoming anxiety.
The key is to STOP thinking about everything else that could happen, because you’ve already made your peace with the worst thing. Thinking about all the other things that could go wrong is just wasting your time.
*HINT* sometimes to STOP thinking about the negative, we have to START thinking about the positive.
And I don’t know about you, but I have better things to do than making myself sick.
5. Break the cycle by overcoming anxiety.
I’m not saying you’ll never feel anxious again. Like I said in the beginning, anxiety is one nasty beast! But hopefully, you’ve learned some strategies for overcoming anxiety that will help you keep that beast at bay.
Change starts on the inside. We can break the cycle of anxiety and hopefully, create a culture that values emotional stability and mental toughness over constant worry and overanalyzing.
For more tips on how to overcome anxiety and turn it into your superpower, check out my post on the power of the anxious mind.
CLICK HERE to get the complete Anxiety Remedy.
Listen to the Chronically Conscious podcast for more mental health and personal growth tips.
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