How To Fight Anxiety When You Feel Like Giving Up
How To Fight Anxiety When You Feel Like Giving Up
Somehow, in the bustle of those fast minutes, jam-packed schedules, and never-ending to-do lists, life passes. It passes, and, if we’re not careful, it moves faster than we can grasp it.
To be human is to experience stress. Stress, in its appropriate doses, has numerous health benefits. It keeps us alert and motivated; it encourages us to take action and engage in positive change.
But anxiety, the escalation of stress, operates on a different wavelength. Anxiety is the suffocating and unnerving feeling of restless dread. Whether it’s panic attacks or sleepless nights or frustrating phobias (or all of the above), anxiety has the uncanny ability to deplete our confidence and deprive our souls.
It’s as if you want to climb a mountain when you’re only running on a treadmill. Anxiety can be the express lane to exhaustion. So what do you do when you feel like you’ve tried and tried- and now you’re tired of trying? Can you learn how to fight anxiety when nothing seems to work?
Accept The Anxiety
Carl Jung once said, What you resist not only persists but will grow in size.
When you’re considering your anxiety, this mantra carries significant weight. The more you resist and suppress and deny how you feel, the more those feelings beg for your attention. By getting angry at your anxiety, you become frustrated with yourself- and that makes you more anxious!
But, what if you could wholeheartedly accept your anxiety? For what it is? For what it’s done? For what it (may) potentially do? What if you could listen to what this part of you needed with open ears and a nonjudgmental mind?
What if the goal was to focus on identification and management rather than strict elimination? What if the goal was to find peace within the anxiety, rather than peace only outside of it?
Lean Into Structure
Anxiety festers in uncertainty. It pokes and prods and rears its ugly head when we’re in wide, open stretches of time. Routine and rituals, on the other hand, offer sanity. They provide us with a direction for what lies ahead.
Structure helps keep us sane. It provides an inherent sense of purpose and fulfillment. Likewise, it keeps us focused on movement (rather than stagnation).
While it takes time to develop the structure that works best for you, this process doesn’t need to be complicated. For example, what are three tasks you can commit to accomplishing every day? What about devoting 10 minutes to meditation every evening or 30 minutes to taking a walk every week?
Own your structure, and treat it like its comfort. You deserve comfort. Identify what soothes you and make it a priority to infuse that into your daily life.
Unhinge The Trauma
Often, anxiety sits on top of a trauma iceberg. The symptoms are the mere manifestation of past horrors and pain. If someone or something hurt you, your mind and body adapt by acting in survivorship mode.
Ideally, you want to process and work through this trauma with a trained professional. A therapist can help you safely explore what happened to you- and come to a reasonable place of acceptance. By reaching a place of acceptance, you find yourself relaxing naturally. Your mind and body no longer have to work overtime to mask you with rigid survival.
The anxiety may not disappear entirely, but you’ll notice a serious reduction in its intensity. You learn to trust people and open your heart to the world a bit more. In return, you begin to define yourself as more than your trauma, as more than a summary of your past.
How To Fight Anxiety No Matter How Painful It Seems
Anxiety distorts logic. But anxiety also tells us something about ourselves. It tells us that we have pain, that we have fear. This amplified stress tells us that we are human.
Anxiety is a part of ourselves. By separating and examining and making peace with that part, we learn how to find the space for healing. It may be challenging, but it can be done.
You can learn how to fight anxiety by attempting to add more anxiety. Or you can fight it with peace. You can tackle it alone, or you can tackle it with a professional who understands in the way you’ve always needed someone to understand.
