A simple solution for Anxiety - reframing anxiety

Disclaimer : This article does not cover treatment of clinical anxiety disorder.

What is anxiety?

There are many different definitions for anxiety. For Me it is a reaction, from the body and mind, when I am faced with a difficult, unexpected situation. It feels like the classic, flight or fight or freeze reaction. The physical part would be apparent with feeling of increased heart rate, sweating, and strength or weakness. Mental counterpart is mainly a worry, hyper awareness or even freeze. Like when there is a storm. But there is a spectrum of feelings you can get, starting from exam stress to a generalized anxiety disorder where you might not find a specific reason but just anxious. Stress generally has one reason; anxiety can be with multiple reasons.

Simple solution for anxiety

When I said simple solution, for anxiety it may not be applicable to every type of anxiety. Specially to severe forms where you are not under control of any of your emotions or thought. However, for most simple forms of anxiety, which makes you procrastinate on everything important in your life, this should work. The trick is as following, and you might need little understanding of the mechanism.

nature

Consider when you were happy last time. Not just happy, very happy. Maybe you won a medal from some competition. Maybe you passed an exam. Maybe you were out at a party with your friends dancing whole night. What did you feel? racing heart rate, super aware of your surroundings. Elated and excited. Even anticipation of good things. Compare with this your anxious feelings. Can you see any similarity. I would say a lot of similarity is there. Except where we anticipate bad things compared to good outcomes during episode of anxiety. If you agree the feeling of excitement is similar to feeling of anxious, we can do our trick. That is to reframe anxiety to excitement.

Reframing anxiety as excitement as a simple solution.

It really does work. I checked last time when I was anxious to start writing. This blog post!. It might work for anything simple. Like, if you're anxious to take a walk, reframe your anxious feeling as "I am feeling excited to take a walk". If you're feeling anxious to open your textbook, reframe the feeling with "I am excited to open my book". Not because you are trying to lie to yourself. But because that is the true nature of the feeling. The label we put into our feeling is just a label. What you feel inside never came with a name. So, who knows, there maybe a language out there where people do not have the word "Anxious" and these imaginary people are never Anxious in their entire lives! now that is a happy thought.

Let's have an exited day.