According to the American Psychological Association:
“Anxiety is an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts, and physical changes like increased blood pressure.
It is not the same as fear, but they are often used interchangeably.
Anxiety is considered a future-oriented, long-acting response broadly focused on a diffuse threat…
The issue is that the threat ONLY exists in your mind-body whether that be now or “in the future” (the future never arrives, it’s always now).
Yes, there are physical threats. And there is intuition guiding you to move away from certain things and people.
But none of these can ultimately break or damage the conscious-energy that you are.
As we forget that early on in life, anxious reactions have become the norm for most of us. You forget who you really are.
At some point in your youngest years you no longer felt safe and at one with everything
(For some this is earlier and a more traumatic experience than for others).
You constructed the sense of “me” in your mind-body to keep you safe within a society built by the collective imagination: Businesses, families, social circles, cultures, education etc.
Until today.
You fight against it.
You think you have to overcome it through “figuring it out” – overworking the part of the brain that thinks it’s in control. The part that creates the anxiety in the first place.
Or through taking pills to numb your feelings.
Can you imagine how powerful it would be to lose the fear of anxiety and be able to get curious about it, trusting in your mind-body’s capacity to heal you?
More on that next week.
Read more in our ”Anxiety” series on our blog over the next few weeks.
