You see, when you don’t allow an emotion to be you effectively tell the emotion I’m not going to recognize you. What does the emotion do? The emotion stays, because the emotion actually wants to be acknowledged. Anxiety is a state of being and it’s also an emotion. It’s a feeling. ‘I feel anxious’ is the language we speak from. When we feel anxious for a consistent enough amount of time, and we hear the word anxious, we start to then move into the new reality, called ‘I have anxiety’. What does that mean? Well, what it looks like generally is you have a sense that even if you don’t experience anxiety in every moment of the day – I hope that’s not the case for anyone reading this – just around the corner is going to be another incident where you get to experience that anxiety. You know that a panic attack is around the corner, and you have that impending doom about the possibility. Inside of thinking about the possibility of a panic attack, you may have a panic attack.
And then if you are actually in a panic attack, you are thinking about, ‘Oh God, how am I going to survive the panic attack?’ ‘How am I going to deal with this attack?’ There is the heightened breath. You try and take a deep breath and you’re struggling to do so. Your throat is seizing up.
It is not a comfortable experience and it becomes even more uncomfortable the more we avoid the experience.
What if it was about experiencing the experience? What if bringing curiosity to your experience of a panic attack was actually what was going to make the biggest impact in dealing with panic attacks. What if just letting go of the idea that there was something wrong with experiencing anxious thoughts, was actually part of the release from being anxious? From being anxious as an identity.
You see, just like it’s unlikely you’ll never not experience fear in some moments. You’re also never likely to not experience some anxiousness in moments in life.
At times we create anxiety as a problem. At times anxiety is something we actually kind of want. When you’re a football fan and you’re at the edge of your seat watching a game. Any moment there could be a goal. Or your team may come back from the edge of defeat or your team may lose. I’m guessing the likely feeling you’re feeling is anxiousness. For me, that’s a welcome feeling. Because it’s exciting as well. You see the reason excitement, and anxiousness come to come to mind and why we welcome it is because it’s the same neurochemical. This means we can’t often separate, what is anxiety and what is excitement. But the more curiosity you bring to the experience – if you feel like the anxiety should not be there – the more likely you’ll be able to bring that excitement into life.
By turn, if you seek to avoid it, you’re more likely to feel more of the sort of stuff you don’t want to feel. So, if you want to experience more curiosity, more excitement, and as a consequence, peace of mind, joy, ease and fulfillment then I invite you to reach out to me at thephilosophicalcoach.com
