Anxiety Disorder
- Anxiety And Self Esteem
Anxiety Disorder covers many symptoms, but the root is always habit. Start addressing that root now.Psychologists have noted that anxiety may be thought of as the inverse of depression: - Depression's speciality is re-interpreting past events to reinforce a present feeling of melancholy.
- Anxiety's speciality is predicting future negative events to reinforce a present feeling of unease.
They're about finding or creating evidence to support the current feeling of malaise - your mind wants to justify how you're feeling. But in both cases, the evidence is tainted...
(Depression Help here)
First of all, let me point out that anxiety disorder and depression are not 'things' (despite the artistic licence in the opening paragraphs) - they are recognisable collections of symptoms that reveal a habitual behaviour, based on an internal conflict of some kind - either known or forgotten.That's right, sometimes feelings are so automatic that we don't remember when or why they first appeared. And even if you can trace those uneasy feelings back to a specific event that started the ball rolling, that has no bearing on how you're feeling now - or you'd be able to rationalize them away instantly. Logically, there's no reason to feel anxious without any obvious evidence of danger. You know that! But emotions over-ride logic since they come from a much deeper, older part of the brain than the reasonings of our human neocortex. In fact, rationalizing only occurs after the emotional state has taken hold, so it's already limiting your analysis. So how do you start to feel better? You focus on the feelings rather than analysing them. Acknowledging your feelings is the first step in addressing internal conflict. That doesn't mean resigning yourself to anxiety - accept that they are there to protect you, but recognise that they are an automatic response based on old experience. You can find exercises to work with these feelings later in this section. Once you have started to work on the physiological anxious responses, you may notice that you are beginning to feel more in control of various aspects of your life. This is because we function best when there is a balance between our emotional and intellectual states, and by calming excessive emotional responses we allow our other strengths to enter into behaviour. Now we can start to shake things up a bit...
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