How to Understand and Handle Anxiety

Anxiety is the most common emotion everyone is familiar with. It may arise at most given scenarios in life with or without context and warning. The thing with this feeling is that it can become quite a hindrance in living a happy life if it's not properly managed by every person.

Also, anxiety’s harmful ramifications aren't only limited to the individual having it, but they can even extend to the people around us. With this guide, we will dive into how the feeling of anxiety actually works and what we can do to not get overwhelmed by it.

How Does Anxiety Work?

It all comes down to how our subconscious mind works, and that is also affected by our genes. Let's picture in our mind for a while how the Homo Erectus lived around 2 million years ago.

They lived in big groups and some of the Homo Erectus in these groups led a small number of them to gather water and food back to their caves.

The problem they had with this is that they didn't exactly know how nature worked and hunt large animals (like straight-tusked elephants). To survive and evolve, they needed to understand what is dangerous and what it isn’t and how to deal with any danger if necessary.

That’s where anxiety comes in. This formed and ever-evolving emotion informed them about the impending dangers they might face in various scenarios for them to address these problems accordingly.

For example: escape the danger, not getting hurt till a certain threshold, face animals with the appropriate weapons at the appropriate time, etc.

That emotion was also plugged in their DNA so that their descendants would inherit it and in turn develop the ability to survive because of it.

So after many years of evolution, this feeling has developed in a way that it stopped being a sensation that is limited to our survival against nature.

It has grown so much that it can form whenever we see something in our minds as a danger to our everyday life.

Moreover, an extra feature that anxiety got through its maturation is that the levels of anxiety that we feel directly relate to the way we make up and comprehend the problem we have at hand.

For example, if you think that losing the human you love is going to be a disastrous thing in your life, then your anxiety will kick in certain situations (like in a fight between you) to inform you that an impending danger might be coming your way (like breaking up with them).

That is the instinct that notifies you to prepare suitably for the possibility of the aforementioned danger becoming reality.

In addition, if you strongly believe that breaking up with your loved one might disrupt your balance in life, then the anxiety you will feel is going to be enormous.

And that’s only true because you have shown to your instinct that this poses a grave danger to your life’s balance and needs to be avoided at all costs.

How to Deal With Anxiety?

Understanding how anxiety works, in general, is one thing. That’s 50% of the whole process. The rest of the 100% though is implementing your knowledge and actually dealing with it.

Here I will present you with 4 steps that can help you deal with any form of anxiety.

Identify the type of anxiety

The first step is actually recognizing if your worries are either realistic or unrealistic. By realistic I mean worries that are grounded in reality and based upon logical assumptions.

If your worries are realistic, then you should take any action necessary to correct and solve any issue you might have and absolutely not avoid or discard your worries. Any type of avoidance or distraction will make you even more anxious.

If your worries are unrealistic on the other hand, you might prefer not to do any action and actually try to ignore them.

That’s because unrealistic worries work the other way around; they become bigger the more time you spend thinking and acting upon them.

For example, if you think you might be sick without having any proper evidence supporting that claim, then it’s better not to take pills or search in Google for symptoms, but rather disregard these thoughts or go to see a doctor.

Be mentally and physically prepared

Now if your worries are realistic, they will require some form of action for you to take so that they can be reduced.

Before any actual form of action though, you will need to be both mentally and physically prepared for the possible outcomes of these actions and the consequences they will come with.

Analyze all the possible scenarios of your actions and create a specific plan for every situation that might become true in the future.

This will provide your mind with the certainty it needs by knowing that whatever it is that might come your way, it’s gonna be under your control.

Just remember the following things at this stage: firstly, not everything is predictable and therefore you can’t control or know every possible outcome, and secondly, never sugarcoat the consequences of your actions.

Take the necessary actions

Continuing from the mental and physical preparation, it’s time to take the necessary actions to reduce your anxiety and solve your issues at hand. As we have covered before, anxiety is our instinct telling us to take some action to counter an impending danger that might be coming our way.

For instance, if you are studying for an upcoming exam, you will want to be prepared both for the exam in question and its whole process. So you will need to study until you are sure that you are ready for the upcoming test or specifically to a point that you are absolutely satisfied with your efforts and the outcome that they most likely entail.

Give yourself the affection you need

Last but not least, is to always give yourself the appropriate love and affection you might need every step of the way.

If you have constantly negative thoughts or barrage your inner mind with some self-pitying phrases (like I can’t get through this, or I am not strong enough, etc.), you will make the whole situation worse.

Negativity has an exponential correlation with anxiety because it not only makes your worries seem bigger than they really are, but it is impairing you from thinking clearly and acting in the appropriate way for you to minimize them and successfully handle the situation you are into.

Conclusion

While concluding I would like to point out the fact that we all need to understand that our world is not rigid. We as humans like certainty; we always try to put everything into small boxes that are well defined and that likely won’t be changed.

This makes everything in our lives easier, so anything that we think is going to make a change in our lives in the future is triggering our survival instinct.

Furthermore, that instinct usually makes us overestimate the possibility of the worst-case scenario in our mind becoming actually true, even though that might not be the case.

As Rene Descarte wisely said:

Except for our own thoughts, there is nothing absolutely in our power

So try not to become attached to the consequences of your actions, but rather try to accept whatever kind of future your decisions hold.

Understand deeply that our world is fluid and that anything that comes in our way is a challenge we need to face that will provide us with the necessary information and experience to take us a step closer to the ideal version of ourselves.

Guides

1. Self-development and understanding: Marcus Aurelius, Earl Nightingale, Napoleon Hill, Arthur Schopenhauer, Dale Carnegie, and others
2. Learn more about psychology and anxiety: 2KnowMyself