We live in a world where it is easy to become anxious with a constant feed of things to worry about, from war to recession and climate change. What do we do first thing when we wake up? We grab our phones and begin to scroll and see more bad news or social comparisons.
The things we enjoy can also make us anxious. Getting a promotion to afford your dream house, planning the perfect wedding, and running a thriving business can all be stressful. Yet, worrying too much for too long isn’t a positive way to live.
In any given week in England, 6 in 100 people will be diagnosed with a generalised anxiety disorder (Mind) In the UK, over 8 million people are experiencing an anxiety disorder at any one time (Mental Health UK). Long-term anxiety is linked strongly with depression and the two have a high comorbidity rate.
Anxiety can impact your life and those around you in three ways:
- The mind: you can become easily overwhelmed with worry, a negative outlook and a racing mind could impact your sleep. When we don’t rest properly or are unable to relax, it makes us further irritable and anxious.
- Interpersonal relationships: we can become too anxious to socialise or find it exhausting when we do. Our home life can suffer, becoming irritable around those we love. Some bosses that rule with fear are just projecting their own anxieties on those around them.
- The body: anxiety is physical as well as mental, with fatigue, nausea, headaches and other ailments. Long-term, stress and anxiety can lead to chronic health problems.
It’s important to learn how to manage your anxiety and change is possible, I’ve done it myself. I lived with and overcame anxiety.
Ten years ago I had no clue what anxiety was, yet, I was constantly worrying about others’ perceptions about me, that I wasn’t good enough or doing well enough. I was constantly justifying those thoughts with assumptions. For example, ‘I know my boss doesn’t like me because he didn’t respond to my email and ignored my suggestion in the last meeting’.
I was externally leading an extremely successful life yet inside, I couldn’t take it a day longer. I had no idea that I was suffering from anxiety. I was slowly killing myself with stress but not talking to anyone about it. Anxiety isn’t something you can simply shake off or run away from. When I realised that you create anxious thoughts and feelings, things started changing for me.
What is it?
Anxiety is an evolutionary trait that keeps us safe. The caveman who was scared of tigers and fretted about not having enough food for winter and stockpiling was the caveman that survived. Passing on their anxiety-biased genes to us. In the modern world, our minds can’t differentiate between a real and imagined threat so we feel the same way about an email from a boss saying ‘we need to talk’ as we would about the tiger.
Why do we get anxious?
It’s not the situation that creates anxiety but the belief we have about the situation. We create our own reality with our beliefs. Whether you believe you can or you can’t, you will be correct. Nobody believed it was possible to run a four-minute mile, except Roger Bannister, who completed the previously believed unthinkable feat in 1954 in 3:59. Since then, over 1,663 athletes have smashed the 4-minute mile. It’s all about belief.
We have our core beliefs: what we think about ourselves, others and the world. It’s the lens by which every experience is seen. These are set around the age of 7. From our beliefs we create thoughts and from our thoughts we create feelings and from our feelings, we create behaviours and outcomes. Anxiety is created between our thoughts and feelings.
If we have faulty beliefs, these create negative thoughts and feelings such as anxiety. Everyone has their own beliefs and map of the world. Everyone will react differently in the same situation. For example, two people fail a test:
- Person A has the core belief ‘I’m a failure’ so the thought is ‘of course I failed, why bother’. The feeling is depression, the behaviour is not trying again.
- Person B has the core belief ‘I can succeed when I put in my best efforts so the thought is ‘I did poorly because I wasn’t prepared’. The feeling is of disappointment but the behaviour is planning to study more before the next exam.
95% of what we do is ruled by our subconscious. We think we’re the driver in our lives but we’re actually the passenger. If we want to make long-term changes, we need to make it in the subconscious.
The conscious can’t process all the information it takes in at once so it makes assumptions to help us make sense of all the stimuli. We can easily filter out information that doesn’t affirm our core beliefs whether we realise it or not. We delete, distort and generalise as well as forecast and mindread without hard facts. If you believe nobody likes you, accepting facts that affirm this is easy, like noticing a friend not texting back but then you look over the fact that you got invited to two parties at the weekend.
To change our thoughts and feelings such as anxious feelings and worrying thoughts, we need to change those core beliefs in our subconscious. You can begin by questioning your thoughts through cognitive reframing. For example, if you have the thought ‘my boss hates me’, take a step back and start looking at the facts. What evidence do you actually have for that? They usually treat you well but maybe they have a newborn and are losing sleep so this becomes ‘my boss is just having a bad day’ when you use all the evidence. This takes practice and conscious effort but with time, it becomes habit to reframe when we refocus the lens on the whole picture.
This is also what we work on during coaching, thereby, changing people’s outcomes, confidence and happiness. I speak from experience when I say anxiety can be overcome; the tools are within ourselves and with the right support we can heal from within.
