What I learned from being anxious....

Now, let me start off with the disclosure that I am not a doctor, nor am I attempting to prescribe or diagnose.  If you have anxiety or an anxious condition, please see your physician.

I am someone who went through a period of both anxiety and depressive thoughts.  There were multiple factors that contributed to both - life situations that were out of my control and I was not equipped to deal with.

The truth of the matter is most of us are not equipped to deal with life, at least we aren't taught tools early on that could properly help us.  Much of western medicine is built on treating and eliminating the symptoms, rather than getting to the root of the problem (which creates a whole new set of symptoms and conditions to be treated).

We have no control, simply the illusion of it.  Spending all of our time focusing on what could go wrong, imagining worst case scenarios so we can attempt to stop them, imagining what we should have said/done different, all create nothing except stress on our bodies

The more we engage in anxious thinking, the more the body responds.  We aren't breathing as deeply, so our body physically becomes deprived of oxygen which triggers a panic/stress response because the body needs more oxygen to function.  Since we feel that anxiety in our body now, it continues to reinforce those anxious thoughts.

One of the most important lessons for me was learning that I am in control of my thoughts, not a victim to them.

If you have never, ever, heard this before, you may think I'm full of shit.  But it's only because we have never been taught to control our thoughts.  Thoughts just happen.  Internal chatter happens and we assume (or I assumed) I react to that.  We are never taught that we can alter our brain patterns to actually create thoughts that support us.

Is this easy? Hell no.  It requires conscious effort, but the benefit is so much peace and ease.  Our bodies are relaxed.  Life is more enjoyable.

One of the other lessons for me was paying attention to my breathing.  When I was feeling anxious, I was not breathing.  Since breathing happens all the time for us without conscious thought, it never dawned on me that my body would stop doing it.  But our minds are that powerful to influence our body.