How anxiety about anything and everything could be a good sign.
You have a headache. Your chest is tight. You have these gnawing worries in the back of your mind. You’re breathing heavy. Palms are sweaty.
Mom’s spaghetti.
Alright I’ll stop. But seriously a lot of us right now can relate to those kinds of symptoms right now. It’s called anxiety and there are plenty of reasons to be feeling it right now.
But whether it’s people out of concern for you or some self-help guru talking about the subject, a lot of the advice that people hear when it comes to anxiety sucks.
It either boils down to people asking said anxious person what’s wrong and trying to therapy the person out of it, or they’re under the impression that the anxiety you’re experiencing is entirely unreasonable.
You’re getting anxious about the weather. Or how the government is controlled by a bunch of billionaires. Or you’re anxious about a war on the other side of the world that has nothing to do with you. There’s nothing you can do about those things so just stop being so anxious.
As I said, those kinds of avenues to working through anxiety suck and that sort of pull yourself by your bootstrap tactics tend to make matters worse.
I’ve learned quite quickly how not addressing particular emotional issues only build up more and more over time and the best way to build up emotional issues is by ignoring them or watering them down. When you need help, it’s important for you to be proactive and to find solutions that are actually effective.
In certain cases, yes it is going to be challenging or next to impossible. These days with the planet going through a meltdown, price for food and shelter are climbing and each year you’re making less and less money, solutions like global sweeping environmental reform and affordable prices and living wages isn’t exactly something one person can do.
But therein lies the beginning of a new path.
Resting on a knife’s edge isn’t something we all want to be living through, but when you understand anxiety and can use it for something constructive, things can begin to change for the better.
From irritation to hatred, depression, and others, negative emotions on the surface feel bad but also provide a lot of utility for us. It can be difficult to notice this because for years we’ve been conditioned to focus on the positive and repress the negative. As a result, when negative emotions arrive, they’re that much harder to deal with. All of this further reinforces the idea of having more positive emotions.
But positive emotions all the time isn’t necessarily a good thing. As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, it can water down these important moments where in our lives we can’t think positively out of a situation.
Positive thinking isn’t going to solve your boss underpaying you or that you’ve got to work multiple jobs. It’s not going to solve hatred or war. It’s not going to suddenly reverse climate change.
We’ve seen how thoughts and prayers contribute to gun violence. Positive thinking isn’t that much of a stretch.
In the end, negative emotions are very helpful because they are the starting point to actual changes. Anger and fear, when used properly can be fuelled for motivation and to identify particular problems. It can then be used to further force change to happen.
A prime example of this is the writer’s strike. People were so angry and frustrated with the old structure writers simply left and stopped the money printing machine as it were.
While there is still positive emotions — like hope that things will get better. But what fuelled these movements is largely negative emotions. And even with that being on a larger scale, these same rules apply on an individual scale too.
If you’re frustrated, angry, or sad about something, you can use those emotions to problem solve your way out of it. Whether it’s possible to actually do it or not is an entirely different matter, but being able to figure out a solution is a good start.
Getting back to anxiety itself it starts the whole process that something doesn’t feel quite right. That something doesn’t belong and that what we’re going through right now isn’t normal.
And to some extent, what we’re dealing with isn’t normal at all.
People fighting petty wars for no real reason. The planet is warming up faster than ever before due to our reliance on a resource that we should’ve ditched a long time ago. And we’re allowing, encouraging, and enabling select groups of mentally ill rich people to gain massive power over us to the point that even people in developed countries are struggling to live.
This isn’t exactly normal.
Even though normality is pretty subjective, these kinds of overarching problems can be solved over time. We can organize, unionize for better wages and work treatment, petition to politicians, vote on things that matter and protest for the values we believe in.
And anxiety can help with that in reminding us that where we are now isn’t normal but that we have the ability to change that around. It is up to us to make a difference.
We don’t need to pull ourselves by our bootstraps or be harsh on ourselves about the reality of the world. Those things really only slow us down. But we can use our anxieties and negative emotions to motivate us to do something about it and see where that takes us.
To simply do it.
And over the course of going through and solving that problem, more details can emerge.
Perhaps you’re more anxious at work because your partner spends your money on various things and you happen to be in a controlling and abusive relationship.
You might be taking anxiety pills for the sole reason that you have very few connections and you’ve ended up with habits that make your living situation worse. Maybe you’re poor with budgeting, or you have expensive habits that don’t improve your life.
Or maybe you realize before you can solve the anxiety, you must first reach out to other people. You might realize that the problem you’re dealing with can be better solved collectively rather than entirely on an one’s shoulders.
Regardless of the situation, anxiety is both paralyzing and revolutionary in uncovering various issues that directly impact you. That these problems are a bigger priority in your life that need to be addressed in some fashion. And anxiety gives a good reason to follow through with that, after all, it’s an emotion that prompts us to resolve it in some way.
The biggest issue with negative emotions is we don’t always talk about them. I can understand it to some extent since negative emotions do make us feel vulnerable and we don’t always want to expose that to the general public.
Especially in cases where people misinterpret the intention and it causes further anxiety.
But at the very least, these negative emotions and viewing of them can be done on an individual level and how to do that is to begin seeing how these emotions can help in the situations they emerge.
The idea isn’t to actively seek these negative emotions at all times. Rather, like breathing meditations, to take notice of things as they develop and reveal themselves. With breathing meditations, you want to focus on your breath and pay attention to it. Emotions work in the same way where it’s key to notice them and process them.
This doesn’t always solve the anxiety issues you have of course since some resolutions require a lot of time. But I do think it’s more valuable than a cheesy one-liner in an attempt to cheer someone up.
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