After many years dealing with anxiety I believe that I finally started to learn how to manage it in a way that works for me. And since then, I’ve noticed some funny patterns inside my mind.
I noticed that I kind of miss the anxiety ruling my mind and body. Don’t get me wrong, it is a bad feeling, but I’ve spent so much time with it, so it became somewhat comfortable.
I have years of experience in coping and leveraging anxiety to achieve my goals, and it works great. Which means this is a safe strategy for my brain. I don’t have to make any decisions when I’m driven by anxiety, I also don’t have to care about all the other things i’ve been ignoring over the last years. Sometimes it was paralyzing and excruciating painful, but I would still have a thing to worry about, a thing to focus on, a purpose.
The amount of energy needed to trick my brain into another strategy is really huge, but It’s been worth it. I have to constantly remind myself that I’m able to move forward without relying on the perks of anxiety and also to stay aware not to fall into my default behavior.
I like to believe I’m doing a pretty good job so far. I’m feeling like I have emotionally more space. As if I was filled to the top with anxiety, so there was no room at all to let other emotions come in, and now I have a little bit of space for the things I’ve been ignoring.
Since I’m not used to have this space I’m just trying to observe what kind of thoughts and feelings end up filling it and how long do they stay there, as a way of self knowledge. And what I found out through that active observation is that what comes up is usually some kind of need of mine, often disguised as a random thought. It’s been a funny experiment to notice and address this needs, because although they are literally myself, I had no idea some of they existed.
I wonder how much of myself I have ignored while indulging and leveraging anxiety.
Tradeoffs, right?