Fantastic Fridays-#286 The Strong Within Daily Affirmation Podcast
I Pivot from Anxiety Into More Faith, Love, Hope And Action.
Disclaimer, I am not a doctor, and I’m not claiming to be the answers for your ailments…but I do want to bring ideas of different possibilities for your life. So do your own research and personal trials, and not just take my word for it.
The Bible has a few mentions about anxiety…but there’s one that is so beautifully written that I want to share it with you, so here’s the book in the New Testament of Matthew 25-34 from the New International Version Translation:
25 “Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or drink; or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothes?
26 Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?
27 Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?
28 “And why do you worry about clothes? See how the flowers of the field grow. They do not labor or spin.
29 Yet I tell you that not even Solomon in all his splendor was dressed like one of these.
30 If that is how God clothes the grass of the field, which is here today and tomorrow is thrown into the fire, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?
31 So do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’
32 For the pagans run after all these things, and your heavenly Father knows that you need them.
33 But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.
34 Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.
Now I am not going to get into the old religious argument of who is worthy and who is not of being in God’s grace as the passage references pagans…but I want to get this idea in your head that that God is all providing, that the Universe is ever abundant, and when we let go of worry, when we pivot from focusing on fear, anxiety or worry…we begin to see the beauty of what we are gifted. How the simplicity of nature is clothed in what it needs, and the animals of this earth are fed what they need…so why should we be any different?
Anxiety happens by focusing on what we fear, and that is how it masters us. It tells us that change is scary…but pain comes from staying the same. Anxiety likes to divide us, it likes to lie by telling us that things will be bad, things will always stay this way, that it’s in control and we have no power over it, and that there’s no use in trying to overcome it.
And when we think this way we are giving power to inanimate objects. There is are sayings that people can use quite frequently of the devil made me do it, or the devil was tempting me. Now there might be a supreme being who is all evil…but in the end, devil or not…he can never make us do anything…we choose to do something. And we do the same by giving anxiety life and power saying it’s in control of us, and that we can’t do anything about it. So we take medication and raise our hands in the air as we feel helpless thinking there’s nothing that can be done.
What we have to realize is that anxiety is not a state of being, anxiety comes from the thoughts we focus on which then create emotions to those thoughts that are focused upon fear…which create the emotions in our body that make us believe that whatever we’re afraid of is true. So I’m not saying anxiety isn’t real, but what I am saying is that we create that anxiety by how we focus upon things…so if we’ve created it then we can uncreate it. And that happens by creating different habits and thoughts towards a more productive focus…such as focusing on faith, hope, love…and taking action in our thoughts by telling ourselves a better story than the one of fear or that I can do nothing about this fear.
What we focus on we become, and so the more we focus on anxiety…then the more we become it. Our mind and bodies are so interconnected that your brain will tell the body what you are experiencing is so real…that your body follows suit and gets itself worked up to protect you…in essence that emotion becomes a physical reaction in your body…it becomes a truth to your body. Think about when you laugh so hard how happy and free you feel, think about a time you thought about loving memories from family members and how your body felt warm, calm and light as you felt love all around and within you…and the same is true for anxiety.
So if you are feeling anxious there are many more ways to work on it than besides saying there is nothing I can do about it so I’ll just take an antidepressant or some sort of anxiety medication to deal with anxiety. Now I want you to really hear me…I am not saying medication is bad… I am saying the belief that medication is the ONLY answer…is.
Everyone’s different…for me dealing with anxiety or stresses I walk, write, and meditate every day and that’s helped focus me differently. I think it’s great to have external things help calm you down, and I talked with a client of mine that it’s good to have those physical things, but I also said what if you can’t go to the gym, what if you can’t get outside… and what I was trying to elude to is that the answer is in you and when you can learn how to deal with what some call ANTs… or also known as automatic negative thoughts. But we can change ANTs, by learning to program our thought processes and mind differently. Whether through professional help through cognitive therapy or on your own by learning to become aware of those negative thought patterns and then changing them. In fact that’s how I got over my depression and suicidal thoughts by learning to hear my inner dialogue and then working to change it.
So, what could be your ways of pivoting from anxiety into something better?
Is it practicing mindfulness and affirmations, is it daily exercise, is it yoga, is it getting outside in nature and getting more into appreciation, is it calling a friend up to talk about the beauties of life, is it finding hobbies or activities that remind you about how wonderful and amazing as your life is….and of course is it becoming more aware of your automatic negative thought patterns?
I think people have trouble getting over anxiety first from not dealing with the problems they fear that’s causing the anxiety…and then they avoid it by ignoring it...or they do things that help them avoid it that aren’t healthfully such as self medicating with alcohol, drugs, risky behaviors, or anything that will distract them for a moment…and when you ignore something, it doesn’t mean it goes away…it just comes back stronger because you have stuffed too many anxious events one by one together waiting for your inner jar to fill up until you can’t take it anymore.
I dated a gal in college who had a panic attack and I thought she was seriously dying… We got her to the ER and her parents later let me know she had them all the time…and I was kind of upset because no one ever told me about them and I was so worried about her and thought she was dying…
During my freshman year in college I didn’t have a car so when her attack happened I called my friend in a different building to come pick us up and take her to the ER. While we waited I had her breathe in a paper bag, I made sure she took deep breaths as I saw how quick and labored her breathing was, I said calming things to her to help her focus on good things rather than the fear she was feeling of dying, and I did whatever I could to help her focus on the realness of the situation rather than the fear in her mind…at the time I didn’t really know what was happening to her, but I knew I had to work to help her feel loved and calm in the moment so we could get her to the ER safely whatever it was that was happening to her.
I remember reading a book called the Survivors Club…and in this book each chapter talked about surviving some dangerous situation…and one chapter was on hypothermia… that if you were walking across ice and it broke and you fell in--you were to focus three things…they called it 1,10, and 1 hour. They said you had 1 minute to regulate yourself in the water. When people fall in the water, they either freak out and tire themselves out and drown… or they freak out and cause themselves to have heart attack and drown. After that minute you had 10 minutes to get out before your temperature would get too low and you go into shock. And the final step was you have an hour to be able to warm yourself up properly.
And when I read this book years later from that panic attack incident, I understood I was instinctively working a process to help her get to place that was safe mentally and physically. I was helping to calm her, to lower her heart rate, to lower her breathing frequency, and to help her mind get from racing and panicking into a calmer state.
We got her to the ER and she was fine, but I know helping her focus on calmer things before we got her there helped the whole situation go much smoother than if she kept escalating her anxiety and panic during the process. Now people say you can’t die from a panic attack…but prolonged stress and anxiety can do much damage to your body over time creating less longevity and decreased enjoyment in life…that is unless you look at panic or anxiety as a roller coaster ride and enjoy that…but then that wouldn’t be a panic or anxiety attack…it might just be an adrenaline rush.
In The Harvard Health Letter it states that Several studies have shown that about a quarter of people with cardiovascular disease have some kind of anxiety problem and, in some cases, the anxiety seems to make the heart condition worse.
So how will you deal with your anxiety and fears today, will you throw your hands up in the air and say this is just who I am, or that I can’t control it. Or will you get in the driver’s seat of your life and begin not only telling a different story to your mind to calm you during your anxious times…but also doing healthy things along the way every day to help change you from feeling anxious into feeling confident you can handle whatever happens to you.
I truly believe the reason anxiety feels so persistent is because we only try to work on it when it happens, instead of doing the right things every day physically and mentally before it ever happens
Today’s Personal Commitment:
What are you trigger points? What makes you anxious or when do you feel certain issues that hinder your life. One way to become more aware of your trigger points is to keep a journal. So the next time you are feeling overly anxious, nervous, or bothered by something take a journal and write down:
The time it happened
What happened before the anxiety
Your emotional state
Where you were physically and who was around you (your surroundings or environment basically)
And any other notes you can think of
By doing this you are creating an awareness of what may be causing it, the patterns that are happening, and by seeing these things it will give you information on being more able to change the next time it happens.
I Pivot from Anxiety Into More Faith, Love, Hope And Action.
Thanks for listening. I'm sending great energy your way as we become Strong Within together,
Personal Development Life Coach-
Chris O'Hearn
Contact info- email: [email protected] phone:865-219-3247
Music by:
- Zest by basematic (c) copyright 2011 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.
- I Have Often Told You Stories (guitar instrumental) by Ivan Chew (c) copyright 2013 Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (3.0) license.
Location: Knoxville, Tennessee USA but available worldwide
