What Is Anxiety?
Let’s just start by naming it and defining Anxiety. At it’s a core it is a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. It’s an intense, excessive, and persistent worry and fear about everyday situations. Physical symptoms are associated with it, and they may show up as fast heart rate, rapid breathing, sweating, tensing of muscles. But also you may feel tired and here’s why. Because physiologically, anxiety is very draining. If you are constantly, intensely, excessively, persistently worried, and fear about everyday situations, don’t you think energetically, you would just be fricking drained? Of course.
How Does Anxiety Show Up?
Here are some of the ways anxiety shows up. First of all, the tightness in the chest and the dread in the pit of your stomach. Numb or tingling wash over your body and skin. From there, avoidance, running away, closed off, walls up, trust issues, and then it starts to show up in our behaviors. Asking a million questions, questioning everything, and extreme skepticism. From there, it can also show up as overeating or undereating and compulsive behavior or need to control. Energetically, you can also feel irritated, annoyed, and flustered. It can also feel like one giant blockage, just shut down and just stuck. We have the whole spectrum from rapid, erratic, paranoid to desperate and just powerless and depleted because you’re so drained, checked out, disconnected, disassociated to irritated, all the way to block.
What Causes Anxiety?
- Negative thinking
- Lack of boundaries
- Skipping meals
- Lack of sleep
- Not having routines, lacking consistency
- Not knowing who you are
- Lack of confidence
- Being out of touch with feelings and needs
- The pressure of being responsible for other people
- Losing yourself to what family, peers, partners, or what society wants
- Disconnected from your authentic self, voice, expression, and true self
- Lack of self love, lack of self care, lack of self trust, lack of self worth
- High Functioning Anxiety Is Real
- In case you didn’t know, high functioning anxiety is a thing. What does that look like?
- Perfectionism, right at the top
- Overthinking and over-analyzing
- Constant dissatisfaction with performance, overworking, overextending, workaholism
- Inconsistent sleep habits, people-pleasing, inability to say no and lack of boundaries
We’re high performers. We get shit done. We’re reliable. We do good work, and there’s a lot of anxiety around it. It’s a way to cope.
Anxiety Vs. Intuition
If you are naturally an anxious person, you may not know the difference between your anxiety and intuition. Anxiety is really from a place of fear, where your intuition is always guiding you to the highest outcome. Your intuition is guiding you towards clarity and to the highest outcome for you. Anxiety feels tightening, shrinking, desperate or ready to run. Anxiety is about protecting you from danger versus intuition. Intuition feels clearheaded, calm, and focused. It feels certain, and it feels peaceful. So when you look at it like this, they’re entirely different from each other.
How To Overcome Anxiety
If losing yourself is one of the causes of anxiety, wouldn’t finding yourself be the solution? That’s why you’ve got to create space to be truly with your body, to truly breathe into it so that you can create that clarity. Otherwise, anxiety is gonna run the show. And when anxiety runs the show, the only destination is self-sabotage. That’s the problem with anxiety, it deteriorates. So we have to create the space and be truly in our body. Prioritizing self-care, honoring your feelings and needs; building self love and self acceptance, forgiveness to self and others, internalizing and receiving, friendship and community. Lastly, letting people in and receiving love. You have to understand this is the antidote. This is the literal cure. If your love and safety were taken away, and that’s what caused anxiety, wouldn’t it make sense to replenish that and receive love? Wouldn’t that be the cure?
It’s pretty simple math, right?