Thursday, 21 January 2016
Thursday, 7 January 2016
How to Use Anxiety to Your Advantage
As they say, when life gives you lemons, make great lemonade. Should your lemon be anxiety, squeeze it to your advantage instead of wallowing in its sour taste.
Anxiety can hew its way down a destructive path if you allow it. Endless worrying without action will get you nowhere good but on the road to depression. There are ways however to harness its stimulating effect to great benefit.
Only a few have discovered how to channel the destructive power of anxiety for considerable personal advantage. These are people who seem to thrive on stress and pressure. How do these people leverage a liability to perform as an asset? The answer is the willingness to accept a paradigm shift in how we perceive anxiety. What you must do is see anxiety as an asset for improvement and change rather than an overwhelming liability.
Turn anxiety on its head by using this energy on nervous worrying as fuel for taking positive, concrete actions. Incorporate these changes and see if you can turn the tables on a liability and gain some mental toughness as an added bonus.
Use Anxiety as a Kick-Starter for Assessment or Change
The emotion of anxiety has not evolved for nothing. It is one component in our “fight-or-flight” response that kicks in when threats are perceived. Just as anger compels us to stick up for ourselves and jealousy prods us to guard our territory, anxiety can be seen as our radar for taking stock of our current situations or circumstances. Are we doing okay or aren’t we? Will the satisfactory state of our status quo continue 5 years from now? 10 years? Anxiety provokes us to imagine worst case scenarios. It is up to us to use this as a kick-starter for change ...to plan, prepare, modify, improve, or try harder to better our odds of lowering risks and succeeding.Channelling your anxiousness towards improving yourself instead of letting it lead you around a loop of increasing self-doubt is an effective way of avoiding debilitating anxiety, the kind that binds you in overwhelming fear and inaction. In other words, use anxiety as a motivator to push yourself toward self-improvement.
Let’s take a scenario: Your group thinks you have the knowledge and the experience to make a presentation to a crowd on their behalf. Problem is, you are afraid of public speaking and have never had much experience with this activity. In light of this situation, you get all these overwhelming, anxious thoughts… What if I freeze onstage? What if I forget what to say? What if I bore people? What if I don’t succeed getting my group’s message across? When these glum thoughts start raising their ugly heads, challenging your fears and doubts with logical reasoning may put these in perspective. Why not ask yourself: Is my topic interesting? If it is interesting to me, won’t I project that interest in sharing it? Are people in my group going to help me? Won’t I have cue cards to help me find my place? You just may find that a lot of your fears may be blown out of proportion, which should encourage you to know that you may do more than just fine.
Use Anxiety to be Active
All those jittery feelings need to be expelled safely somewhere. When you are starting to get all keyed up, why not use the energy of anxiousness on exercise? There’s nothing like a brisk walk or a run around the block to tamp down those nerves. Plus, you get to keep your body in good shape as well. Exercise releases those feel-good chemicals called endorphins which induces the euphoric “runner’s high,” mood-lifters that lower anxiety and depression. Because exercise with its mood-lifting hormones makes you feel good, moving may make you see things in perspective and realize that they really aren’t as bad as they seem. So the next time your nerves start to get the better of you, lace up and get those endorphins flowing.Use Anxiety to Do Something New
Anxiety can paralyse you to inaction with all the fear and doubt it engenders. To break the stasis, use your nerves as an excuse to go into a new hobby. It doesn’t have to cost much. Hobbies like gardening, painting, collecting music, and baking bread can ease your mind off your trepidations and divert focus to learning new skills. Alternatively, you can use all that energy for worrying toward helping others. Doing volunteer work for a children’s ward at your local hospital or even just helping a friend move house will help take the focus away from yourself. Another plus side to helping others is the reward of feeling some accomplishment and purpose, another positive side effect of going outside of one’s self and garnering some goodwill in the process.Follow Anxiety with Anger
It is strange to hear advice to assuage one negative emotion with another; but for some people, this works. Anger directed at one’s self is used as a challenge to check one’s inability for making decisions stemming from anxiousness. Chronic avoidance or procrastination of decisions and tasks may give way to more stress. Of course not all outcomes of decisions will be positive; but acting and taking risks instead of freezing from inaction may help us learn from experience. Our experiences will help strengthen our mettle when more adverse events or disappointments occur later in life.Anxiety should be perceived as one’s motivator to being proactive rather than just reactive. If you are afraid that a colleague may be better than you at the job, then put in the extra time to improve your skills. Anxiety does not always have to be a debilitating factor. See it as a challenge and a stimulator. Once you recognize its motivational value, you can make anxiety work for you, not against you.
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