Anxiety is a normal and natural human emotion that everyone experiences at times. And, like with most things in life, anxiety exists on a spectrum — from butterflies in your stomach before speaking up in a meeting to a full blown panic attack when faced with getting on an airplane — the degree and impact and triggers of anxiety look different for all of us.
Bottom line: You don’t get out of this human experience without dealing with anxiety.
And while anxiety may be unavoidable to a certain extent, you can definitely cultivate some tools to help you more effectively manage and deal with it so it doesn’t impact your daily life so strongly or so negatively.
So in today’s blog post, I want to share with you four of my favorite and most effective tools to ease and manage the everyday anxiety you may be experiencing in your own life.
What Exactly Is Anxiety?
Anxiety, according to the American Psychological Association, is “an emotion characterized by feelings of tension, worried thoughts and physical changes like increased blood pressure.”
That’s a fine definition, but it also sounds a bit like fear. So how to distinguish them?
One of the ways I describe and distinguish anxiety from fear for my clients is through this example:
Fear is what happens when you’re crossing the crosswalk just outside of my offices and a car comes barreling around the corner and is 10 feet away from hitting you. That surge of energy through your body is plain old primal fear. Anxiety is what happens when you’re crossing that same crosswalk and you see a car 20 blocks away and you start worrying if you’ll be able to cross the crosswalk in time and if that car will hit you if you don’t. Anxiety is fear of perceived threats in the future. Fear is a response to actual threat in the present. Both have physiological impacts. But one is definitely more head-driven. That’s anxiety.
Again, we ALL feel anxious from time to time.
Anxiety basically tries to scan our lives and futures for harm and warns us when we need to take action to protect ourselves.
And while everyday anxiety is normal and natural, when anxiety begins to feel uncontrollable, unmanageable, or starts to interfere with your daily activities, it may be time to seek out support from a licensed mental health or medical professional for support assessing and managing what may be more than normal, everyday anxiety.
Indeed, according to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America, anxiety disorders are on the most most common mental illnesses in the country, affecting as many as 40 million people, or 18% of the population. So bottom line: anxiety disorders impact a lot of us.
