Living with anxiety can be exhausting, frustrating, and painful. This is the most common, natural and complex emotion we feel when we are in psychological distress. To manage your anxiety the first step is to understand this emotion. So what is anxiety?
We call anxiety in Urdu as a condition of Iztarab, Baychaini, Ghabrahat.
Anxiety is your mind and body’s natural response to stress, fears, uncertainty, unfamiliar situation or apprehension about what’s to come. When you feel anxiety you also experience uneasiness or distress feelings .Experience of anxiety is different for everyone because personalities, life experiences, thought process, belief systems, culture and physiology are different. However the common expression of anxiety is expressed as unsettling feeling.
Anxiety is an emotion which has emotional experiences and physical sensation. So in emotional experience you might feel sad, down, low, distracted, de focused. When you feel physical sensations you might sweat, you will feel headache, your heart will pound, and you will experience fatigue etc.
Anxiety is also act as a secondary emotion because you experienced anxiety in the place of another emotion that is difficult for the person to feel or express. Anxiety can be a cover of hurt, jealousy, disappointment, embarrassment, sadness.
Anxiety is a mixture of different emotions and thoughts like fear, anger, sadness etc. and these feelings are caused by our thought process. I express my feeling of anxiety as a tangled colorful thread which has other emotions as well. It represents that I am feeling anxious as a cause of other emotions. When I try to untangle this thread it has other emotions like confusion, anger, etc which are cause of my thought process or fears.
Anxiety is also an expression of other emotions. You experience the intensity of other emotions like fear, anger, frustration, confusion, insecurity, sadness through anxiety in your body. So anxiety feeling is usually sparked by other emotions which are evoked or filled with the thoughts, memories, images that have become subconsciously linked with those particular emotions. When these emotions and thoughts are tangled you will feel anxious.
It is a cause of problematic or unsettling situation. If you are facing challenging or distressful situation in your life than dealing that situation can cause you anxiety. Problematic situations mostly bring a lot of stress, mental and physical fatigue, confusion, helplessness, feeling of being stuck and combination of these feelings can blur your thoughts, can make your mind clouded. Feeling anxious in this situation is very common because anxiety usually derive your attention towards that bigger problem which might be a threat for your life, mental and emotional security.
In which situations we feel anxious? There are different and various situations when we feel anxiety and reasons can be different for person to person. I am highlighting few situations and putting these situations in 4 categories.
You feel anxious when you experience fear, danger, threat: Fear of uncertainty, financial insecurity, unknown, failing in life or exams, being alone, height, flying, threat to life, fear of losing family member and friends, fear of losing support, fear of public speaking, fear of losing job, etc
General life situations can trigger anxiety: Unstructured life and work, too much of work in life, unable to get time for self, missing deadlines, unable to give proper attention to family or home, if a person is experiencing grief, or loss, trauma in life, accidents, change in living arrangements, pregnancy or giving birth.
Critical about own self can make you feel anxious: If a person has low self-esteem, self-confidence, low self-worth, if they think I am not good enough or people have made them believe they are not good enough. Not confident about their appearance, personality or maturity, if emotional needs are not fulfilled, if feels rejected, abandoned, cheated, hopelessness.
Living in unhealthy or critical environment can evoke your anxiety: Continuous critic on your work, continuous sense of judgement, directly or indirectly critic on your personality, judgement of your life style, beliefs, norms, if you feel you are not accepted in certain environment, receiving instructions that you have to behave or act in a certain way, as a person your beliefs about your self is rejected etc.
General perception of anxiety or experience of anxiety is that it is a bad feeling, un settling feeling, alarming feeling, related to emotional and physical pain. This perception is developed because anxietyemotional and body experience is intense. It aches, you experience pounding heart, breathing problem, upset stomach, extreme emotional and body fatigue, increase and decrease in blood pressure, muscle aches, effects on immune system, insomnia, de-focus, cannot think straight, blur thought etc.
However there are positive sides of anxiety which we are not aware of.
Anxiety act as your defense mechanism. If you sit with this feeling of anxiety it always tells you something to change or protect you from the dangerous situation or a life threat. Anxiety is an adaptation of fear response. Anxious people immediately respond to threat than people who don’t experience anxiety generally in life.
This is your defense mechanism which alerts and protects you from dangerous situations or potential threats. It allows you to make conscious decisions about the presence of danger and how to protect yourself.
Anxiety directs your attention towards problems. Anxiety is a very strong emotion and has intense impact on your body, mind and emotion that is why sometimes you feel that it is difficult for you to focus. Your mind and body are likely trying to divert your focus on a situation which needs to be addressed immediately. It may also gives you a sense of what you truly want in your life and helps you to take action on, even if it may be difficult to do so. Anxiety can direct you to see that situation is too important to ignore. It behaves like a stubborn child, if you don’t listen to its voice it will keep on coming, making you feel distress, uncomfortable, unsettled until you do something about the situation or a problem. It will keep on deriving your attention towards the unsettling things you are experiencing in your life.
I also believe that anxiety has a strong connection with growth because it always asks you to change and move ahead in your life. So it acts as a catalyst in your growth process. Because of anxiety you grow in your life it keeps asking you to remove obstacles, challenges, problems and negativity in your life and move forward.
Anxiety connects you with your core values which are developed by you. It acts as radar to show us what is right and wrong for us. To fully eliminate anxiety would be to eliminating perspicacity and self-awareness. We feel anxious when someone is criticizing us, talking against our belief/ value system, discriminating us, bullying us etc. It helps you to connect with your real self and original belief system which is not influenced by the external environment. So when something goes against your value or belief system, it is the anxiety which encourages you to say NO to the situation or behavior.