You Are Not Your Anxiety: Strategies For Overcoming Anxiety

I spent many years as an adult fighting bouts of anxiety, including experiencing panic attacks & agoraphobia.

Today, I rarely experience anxiety and I wanted to share some strategies to overcome your internal struggle like I was able to.

First, you cannot fix what you don't acknowledge is a problem. It's very easy to lie to ourselves by excusing away our internal conflict as being part of who we are but we wouldn't say that a broken leg is who we are.

Part of the issue with mental health is that we speak of it as being something that is of a permanent nature when it's like any other infliction. Many medical issues are treatable and it's the same with mental health.

If you've been living with this for a long time, understand that your anxiety is likely a temporary condition that hasn't been properly treated, which is why it feels endless. It's typically a culmination of negative habitual thought patterns & reactions to events.

Experiencing anxiety is a normal part of the human condition, it's just a matter of if you're experiencing too much anxiety in a simple situation or over-emphasizing stress in areas that are actually low-stress. In other words, your threshold for danger is too low.

For example, if someone said we are going to a new restaurant, I would overthink and worry about where I would sit & where to park for days leading up to the event. Of course, after I'd got there, everything was fine yet I stressed myself over something so simple.

A simple strategy that I started using in the very beginning was asking myself a simple question: "What's the worst that could happen?"

I would answer the question & 100% of the time the answer wasn't that bad.

To do something like this, you have to be mindful that the anxiety exists in the first place. Usually what accompanies anxiety is negative language, especially about yourself. Whenever I feel the urge to think or speak negative words or phrases, I would catch myself & correct it.

When you're anxiety riddled, you're always in your head and second-guessing yourself. When you speak or think negatively, you act it out as well. That restaurant could be fun but you'll find a negative rationalization to not attend because you don't like that kind of food.

Or maybe you don't want to be around other people because you're uglier than everyone else. Or you're poorer...the list goes on. Negativity only feeds more negativity but positivity can pull you out of the negative anxiety downward spiral.

Sometimes anxiety or panic attacks are triggered due to a negative environment. If you can change it asap. I found that I only had panic attacks at my old job and even my therapist admitted that nothing will change until I leave that position. They were right.

It was a high-stress environment that routinely had people go out on stress leave. There was no point in fighting to stay there, I needed to leave to get better in my life. If you're in something similar, you have to believe that you can do better & deserve a better life outcome.

Let's say you identify that your anxiety is a problem, I would highly suggest seeing a licensed therapist. A couple of suggestions: If you find a therapist you're not comfortable with, keep searching. It's normal. Once you find a therapist, don't use them as a crutch.

A good therapist is supposed to not just listen to you express your issues but to give you strategies to manage anxiety when you're in those moments. What often happens is that patients see therapists as their crutch & never get better.

Overcoming anxiety is a single-person mission with the occasional support from others along the way. Ultimately, no one can change how you feel about yourself or how you view the world, only you can. The strategies you learn from therapy need to become habitual; that takes work.

When anxiety becomes an issue in your life, you tend to become risk-averse and fearful of the unknown. I found that the risk is the challenge to make yourself a better person and the unknown is where some of the beauty in life is.

As you are taking those small steps to improve your life, exposure to the very thing you're anxious about is beneficial. For me, I started solo-traveling internationally and that put me in every unknown there is to experience in one shot.

This may not be your path but do something similar. If going to new restaurants gives you anxiety, go more often. If meeting new people makes you anxious, put yourself in those positions more often. You're trying to change your behavior & reaction but this requires practice.

Anxiety will have you saying "no" too often and you're trying to alter your mindset & behavior to accept saying "yes" to participating in those experiences.

If you have to trust the plan is the right plan because it is a long process to overcome these habitual mental obstacles.

Once you start to make progress, you will see the return of your confidence. I believe that many of the strongest among us are people who overcome the largest obstacles. Overcoming anxiety should make you proud & confident that you can conquer anything placed in front of you.

My years of progress featured ups and downs but ultimately, the work always pays off. You can be your own worst enemy or your best friend but the choice is yours. You are not your anxiety, you are just experiencing moments of imbalanced stress reactions.

But you can overcome this because God has given you the strength to always overcome.

So, what's the worst that can happen?