Anxiety is an automatic response that is triggered in our most primitive brain when it interprets the presence of danger, and like all animals, we try to avoid it or flee. This is where anxiety begins, in the impulse to flee and avoid. The first step is to be aware of whether the threat is real or just perceived. If it is real, anxiety can make it easier to find solutions.
However, when it is our thoughts and imagination that create the danger, for example: the fear of losing a job, getting sick, suffering an accident, natural disasters or being abandoned by a partner, we find ourselves in a state of self-created threat. In 95% of cases, these situations never happen.
In this self-created state, we begin to live a life in survival mode, feeling blocked and helpless, with high levels of stress and experiencing a series of symptoms such as: elevated heart rate, sweating, tremors, feeling of suffocation, chest discomfort, abdominal discomfort, lack of concentration, lightheadedness, muscle tension, irritability, insomnia and/or fatigue, which can trigger panic attacks.
It is important to note that there are other more serious symptoms, such as the desire to harm oneself or others, as well as mental imbalances, which may require medical treatment and go beyond the anxiety discussed in this article, which focuses on a self-created state.
There are two main approaches to addressing this problem: seek medical, psychological or psychiatric help to treat the symptoms and obtain medication to relieve them, or explore other options to address the situation at its root.
The first medicine we must apply to ourselves is to understand the internal process that we experience as human beings and how we interpret the events that occur in our daily lives. There is a medicine called thinking: if we start the day with negative thoughts, such as focusing on the bad thing that might happen, influenced by the environment and the news, we are taking the wrong medicine.
Thinking regarding the negative drags us into the past, where past events become present in our minds, triggering anxiety based on assumptions. This dangerous body-mind cycle traps us in fatal self-imposition, mistakenly believing that a drug will solve our problems.
When we get used to being survivors, we will always be waiting for the least worst to happen, and we will always find ourselves trapped in being anxious beings. But if we become aware and take responsibility for our well-being, we can overcome anxiety and live a more full and conscious life, letting anxiety only act in real cases.
“The primary responsibility of each individual is to take care of themselves”
#Anxiety #catches
