Anxiety loves you to obey its rules, and it can be subtle, blatant, and ferocious in making sure you stick to what it thinks is best for you. Life feels a struggle, negative patterns of behavior keep repeating, and your world can become so much smaller as you conform to anxieties wishes without realizing it.
That truly sucks.
Anxiety Crisis
In 2017 over 300 million people worldwide were recorded as suffering from anxiety, and that does not take into account the 600 million struggling with other mental health issues, including eating disorders, depression, and bipolar diagnosis.
Astonishingly, this is not, in my view, still seen as the crisis it needs to be. Our obsession with only focusing on what we can see with immediate threats costs us dearly. Anxiety feels like it’s a mental issue alone, and outdated therapy approaches try to treat it that way and can fail miserably.
Fighting Anxiety?
Anxiety isn’t the enemy; it’s essential to point out that anxiety is simply a response to perceived danger, and trying to fight it makes it worse. Anxiety disorders are a physical condition created by a struggling nervous and Limbic System (the emotional and survival center of the brain) causing out of context mental states. Your mind thinks you must be in danger from the way your body is responding and will provide you with negative thoughts and reactions to try and keep you safer now. Healthy long term life goals and intentions become hard to follow as the brain seeks more immediate forms of comfort and safety now.
Treating anxiety holistically makes much more sense than trying to treat it through changing to a more positive mindset alone, which most clients have been attempting and feel a failure at not being able to keep up. I am fortunate to see clients get their lives back on track by working on all aspects of their life, which are creating their anxiety issues — life’s way to short to struggle when you don’t need to.
Stealing your Energy
Anxiety can also steal the energy needed to not only care for ourselves and others but also for the planet too. Feeling overwhelmed and overstimulated is exhausting, which is why trying to switch the brain off as often as possible has become so addictive. Chasing happiness through very short term dopamine hits is messing with our quality of life and our environment too.
Rule Breaker
Anxiety has rules, but when you wake up to how these rules try and trick you into falling for them, then that would happen less often. By taking the pressure off your nervous and Limbic System, they can move back into balance and finally heal. This approach is life-changing, I know from personal experience how that feels and what it could do for you too.
As Gandhi once said, “If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. … We need not wait to see what others do.”
Breaking the rules of anxiety taps into some of your rebellious nature can help you break free from the clutches of anxiety, which can become confused and overprotective. Just think about what your life would be like without anxiety out of context holding you back? This is what Anxiety Rebellion is all about, and I hope you join me in rebelling against anxiety and helping others do the same too.
You can join and follow Anxiety Rebellion on Facebook and Instagram, please share and let’s get this going.
