Now that I am not drowning in anxious feelings every day and have the space in my mind to approach anxiety more rationally, I am able to implement a really cool tool for making anxious feelings go away…
(If you are drowning in anxious feelings, i.e. feeling anxiety every day, this tool likely won’t work for you, but click here for something that will)
Often when we feel anxious there is something completely different that we are feeling underneath, we just haven’t given ourselves the time to feel that original emotion and process it. We process emotions by experiencing them and choosing whether they require more action to resolve them. However, how we live today is too fast paced for this sort of consideration! Everybody is in a rush and busy.
So this emotion instead builds up and will be joined by other repressed emotions until all of a sudden you’re bubbling inside with this emotional boil up that makes you feel like you are going to throw it all up. This frenetic emotion puts your body into sympathetic overdrive (fight or flight) – it’s on edge waiting to respond to whatever’s got you so on edge! The blood rushes from your gut to your limbs and your digestion goes to shit, your mind can’t focus and your focus goes into lock down while your whole being commits to survive. And at this point we often keep going because we still don’t stop and take action to feel the emotions we have repressed (or we numb them temporarily with alcohol, drugs or even sex) and this is where mild anxious feelings downspin into chronic anxiety disorder.
So here is a really simple action you can take.
Ask yourself, what am I really feeling? And list the things out:
- fear
- out of control
- love
- overwhelm
The list can be as long or as short as you need.
Now interrogate the reasons for the feelings you have:
- Too much work on
- Some worry over something real
- Uncertainty regarding a situation
- Fear of loss, rejection, failure, success!
Now we are getting somewhere! We can work with this. We can take action.
- We can spend some time thinking about what we are actually working towards and identify the priority actions to get us there fastest
- We can figure out how to resolve our worry or make a decision whether it is worth our energy to worry at all (if it isn’t that thing can take a walk)
- We can utilise gratitude so uncertainty (or any other negative emotion) is replaced
- We can identify the beliefs driving the fear and whether they actually serve us. We can always create new beliefs that work better for us.
Ultimately, personal development, goal setting, action planning and inner work will always be powerful in overcoming anxious feelings because they give us the control back. We can’t get to where we want to go in the passenger seat of the car. We have to take the steering wheel and drive!
Have you ever been a passenger in a car where the driver is scaring the life out of you? That’s what is happening in your mind! Negative thoughts and negative feelings buzzing around are like a white knuckle rollercoaster for your brain and it does what it knows best instinctively – it steers you away from pain – it alerts your nervous system that the shit is about to go down, so prepare to fight or run! But when we take control of our thoughts and put action into place that restores order our nervous system can’t help but calm.
Breathing will support this process. Contact me for a really simple anxiety breathing technique I learned that beats anxious feelings every time! (Please just specify in the comments that it’s the breathing exercise you are seeking.)
Hope this helps!
Much love if you are feeling anxious. It is an awful thing to battle, but I can help you overcome the battle for good. Click here to learn more
Clare Williamson 