Anxiety is fear.
There are a lot of labels within that, but it’s always fear.
We have a natural avoidance of things we’re afraid of – it’s a survival instinct. That survival instinct may be great for protecting yourself against a bear in the woods, and is rationally fear inducing. There are very few things in today’s world that are rationally fear-producing but this avoidance of something we think will hurt us – this avoidance of fear – still remains. We may have tamed much of the wild, but our innate instincts are still there.
Anxiety has a reason, even if most of the time we’re not aware of what it is.
The key is to understand what that reason is.
When I work with someone with anxiety, I’m interested in finding out the reason that it’s there. The mind tends to be fairly good at protecting us, though much like when people have allergies, sometimes it can be overly protective and give us irrational fears. And with these irrational fears people get annoyed at themselves, try their best to ignore, and push aside these thoughts so that they can do whatever it is they’re trying to do.
Of course this works, but only temporarily, and
the fear always comes back, for fear has no knowledge of its own context.
Our subconscious mind runs about 7000 times faster than our conscious mind, and that subconscious mind happily takes the perception of fear and acts on it, despite our conscious wishes. The conscious mind tries to protect us from the fear, pushing it away as best it can so you can try to function.
When we suppress things, we have no idea why we’re afraid because our subconscious is avoiding the fear. We have no way of making adjustments because we’re trying to ignore it, to push it away, to protect ourselves from it.
But this fear, this anxiety, is always treatable.
It’s about asking the right questions - about reconnecting with those parts. Uncovering the root problem (which is often subconscious), opens the pathway to peace and freedom to recalibrate the fears.
It’s easy to ignore the fears, to push them aside, to pretend they’re nothing and continue on trying (but suffering) each day. We self-medicate with alcohol, cigarettes, too much sleep, escapism, Facebook, television, distractions, or the prescribed zombie-numbness that comes with pills to cover up our fear.
Sometimes we can even have a lifetime of avoidance.
We’re not particularly encouraged to work through it – conversations about how we feel are infrequent [unfortunately] for most, we’re told to ‘just get on with it’ and so on. There's an attraction in the easy way out – pop a pill, go to a movie, scroll endlessly through social media, do anything rather than look within ourselves, within our fear and within our pain.
The only problem is, these things don’t work long-term.
These distractions and dilutions do not address what causes the fear; they only (attempt) to cope with what results from the fear. When we distract ourselves we are suppressing our feelings, and this can have a significant cost on our happiness, our peace, our quality of life and even our expected lifespan. The things that we suppress, even though we may not feel them, they still control us, shackle us, imprison us.
Fears hinder us from reaching our true potential – our true freedom.
Anxiety is a major problem:
When you understand your fear, when you get down to what it actually is, when that [possibly hidden] part of you gets perspective, the anxiety in that area will be gone. Growing and understanding your inner workings in this area will indeed set you free. It will allow you to do more of what you want, to be more of who you are.