Coping with Anxiety

Anxiety by Stock7000

As I continue to increase my capacity for different emotions such as fear, connection, grief, love, and vulnerability, I have not experienced a similar increase in terms of anxiety. Although I have always had a fairly high capacity for dealing with anxiety in the sense that I am able to continue to function and act when I feel anxious, this has also come at a cost. I have been able to function with anxiety through the use of coping strategies that I am now working to shed – numbing, repressing strategies that have allowed me to avoid the full impact of the anxiety. Now that I am slowly replacing these older habits with strategies that acknowledge, accept, and process my emotions as they come up, I am struggling particularly with how to cope with anxiety. Is it an emotion that I wish to increase my capacity for, or is anxiety actually a stress response that is unhealthy and should be avoided? I often see the word “anxious” listed as an emotion, but based on my physical and psychological reactions to anxiety, I think it is in the stress category rather than the emotions category.

I separate stress from emotions in that stress can influence an emotional response, but it is not an emotion in and of itself. It is a physiological and psychological sensation related to dis-ease that has a significant impact on my physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health, but my techniques for coping with stress are different than they are for processing my emotions. I aim to reduce stress as much as possible, and to proactively prevent stress, whereas I am trying to fully feel and go toward my emotional experiences. So what about anxiety? Should I move toward anxiety, try to embrace and understand it in myself, and invite my anxiety to be fully expressed? Or should I take more stringent steps toward preventing and disengaging from anxiety when it occurs?

In viewing anxiety as a stress-state rather than an emotion I ultimately hope to eradicate it, however there is still much to be learned from the experience in the short-term. Anxiety is a symptom of deeper unresolved issues in my life leading me to feel disempowered and overwhelmed in the present moment. This anxious reaction serves as a signpost, indicating the existence of past experiences that were never resolved, which are being triggered by a current event. While it is frustrating that I revert to old coping strategies when I feel anxious, this can also be helpful in pointing me toward places in need of healing. Part of my work recently has been reframingmy sense of failure when old habits reappear and instead embracing these moments for providing clear guidance. If I can unearth and provide closure for those older unresolved emotions, I will ultimately decrease the intensity of my anxiety and experience each life challenge as only present-moment and not evocative of past hurts or fears. Therefore, I have a long-term goal of eliminating anxiety from my life through integrating and resolving the unhealed traumas from my past, but am also hoping to enact a short-term goal of taking significant steps to reduce or redirect the anxiety in the present moment, while I continue to work on those larger issues.