Understanding Anxiety And Stress

It all has to do with what you say to yourself in your head, the beliefs you have about yourself, and your habits.

Guest Writer: Mpumuro Xavier

This article contains some information and knowledge about anxiety and stress in the following ways:

1. Where it comes from

2. What it feels like

3. What the effects of anxiety are

4. Why it is a problem

And also, maybe there are some advantages of being a little bit anxious in some situations. So what's the right level of anxiety to have?

I will start with some examples and you'll start to think about what you can do about it.

1. Avoidable overload

I want to talk about the idea of avoidable overload because anxiety and stress come from having too much coming in, more than we can deal with.

If there's a mismatch between the amount coming in and the amount we can deal with, then we have a problem.

So it's a mixture of the pressure that's on you and your ability to cope and both of these are variable.

If you think about what's coming in, some of it is unavoidable. It is just how life works.

But some of what's coming in is under your control. It’s the things that you could say no to.

Your fixed personality plays a huge role in handling stress and anxiety; some people just have a better ability to cope than others with stress.

We will come to techniques later on in this article on how you can become more and more robust dealing with difficult situations.

It's all to do with what you say to yourself in your head, the beliefs you have about yourself, your habits and all that sort of thing.

For example you might always tend to have some negative thoughts or telling yourself that things aren’t going to work out which eventually gives you a headache and later anxiety.

We could reduce the amount coming in and we can increase our ability to cope. That would make us feel much better. It might tip the balance between anxious and stressed and feeling okay.

And conversely, if we let a bit more in and our ability to cope is less good, we could be tipped over into a mismatch where we've got a negative balance where stress and anxiety start to really get on top of us.

• Signs of anxiety

So what are the signs of anxiety or stress?

Now you may think it's obvious just feeling anxious but actually they're more subtle than that and there are certain things to look out for.

I've noticed in myself that sometimes I'm a bit stressed out and there are certain things that I’m pretty sure are the signs of anxiety.

First off, there are behavioral signs; like thinking about work while you're trying to go to sleep.

You lie there in bed thinking about your boss or thinking about that meeting you're having tomorrow or a presentation that's coming up, then you end up not catching sleep for a couple of hours.

In short, having lots of great ideas while you're trying to go to sleep is a sign of stress.

The other two behavioral signs are quite obvious. The first is drinking in order to relax. You know it’s totally fine with your glass of wine but if you can't relax without a drink, then that is something to think about.

The second is getting easily angered. If you have a tendency to get angry with other drivers in a jam or you feel impatient when you're driving, this could be a sign of stress or anxiety.

In other areas of your life, there are some physical signs like clearly reduced energy, losing weight, or becoming overweight.

It may be because you’ve been comfort eating, you've been working too hard and you haven't done enough exercise, you can't be bothered to exercise, or you are too shy to join that group of sports enthusiasts.

There’s also being unwilling to do things such as tackling problems. Even for completely non-physical things like phoning somebody and you just think ‘I can't face talking to them today’.

All these could be signs that anxiety is eating up your energy and therefore you just don't have anything left to face any difficult problems.

Coming to the mental signs, some examples are: a constant nagging feeling of too much to do just wading through stuff or that it's all coming down upon you or feeling too much to do and within limited time;

Difficulty in concentrating, or not being able to focus on one thing at a time, probably because you keep sort of thinking about other stuff and your brain is dotting around amongst different things;

No longer enjoying things you used to love like being out in nature walking or whatever, as much as you should;

And finally, a reduced sense of humor.For instance, if you're in a slightly difficult situation and something ridiculous happens and it holds you up in a queue or another driver does something really stupid and you find yourself getting annoyed by that rather than laughing at it, that could be a sign of anxiety or stress as well.

You must think about yourself and try to work out what your signs of stress might be, and then ask yourself ‘what’s stressing me out?’.

Why anxiety holds you back

So why is anxiety a problem?

Well, I think the most obvious reason is that it reduces your happiness as well as your performance: you're less likely to be successful and good at your job if you're anxious. This is because your brain works less well when you're anxious.

You don't want to go through your life feeling anxious about things, that's the first thing.

Moreover, what will happen if you're anxious is that you'll avoid things that are difficult and scary; you won't even attempt some things that you perhaps would have succeeded at and maybe things that you would have enjoyed.

You might be thinking “well I don't want to go jogging because, you know what if I break my leg or something”, whereas if you had only done it, you would have found it was brilliant and really fun, and you perhaps were going to be great at it. Briefly, the consequences of anxiety are:

• It leads to not doing things that you would have been successful at and you would have enjoyed.

• There could be a vicious circle where anxiety leads into the habit of avoiding anything difficult.

• You may end up stuck in your comfort zone, not doing things that perhaps would have been good for you or would have led to more excitement; as more challenges lead to more success, growth and learning.

And finally, there's one other snag with anxiety which is, it makes you a less attractive person. I think we all love positive people who go like: yeah let's do that, it's gonna be great.

We don't want that person who goes like: well yeah, but what if it doesn't work, what if it goes wrong. And that's another reason to get rid of anxiety.

Sources-Solutions

There is a list of the things that give us most stress in life and the top ones are discussed below with brief answers.

The first one is a feeling that there isn't enough time to do everything properly. A typical answer to this is making a list of priorities and not spending too long on everything trying to do it perfectly.

The second cause of anxiety is doing a task that you know you shouldn't be doing or you don't really agree with because you didn't say NO.

The third cause of anxiety is multitasking. We worry about forgetting to do some important things and as a result, we start them all. However, if you have a list written down you can then work through it in order and it feels under control.

So don't multitask, write a list and do one thing at a time.

Number four on my list of causes of anxiety in everyday life is an untidy desk. Yeah, this one's a little bit controversial because people might often say “my desk is untidy but it doesn't stress me out”. But do you really like it? And the way I challenge people is; I say “I bet you feel good when you tidy your desk up, doesn’t it feel great to have everything sorted out?”

It is actually because what's happening with an untidy desk is you're worrying about what's at the bottom of that pile. Is there something down there that's becoming urgent? So I think it feels good to tidy it up.

Number five, we've already talked about, are the problems in the back of your mind when you're trying to relax. It might be reading for a test, starting a savings account or whatever.

And the answer of course, is to write them all down in your diary and see if they are really worth worrying about. If you find that they are worth your consideration, go ahead and set a schedule for them and if they are worthless, then your mind will find it easy to ignore them and move on.

Number six on my causes of anxiety in everyday life is deadlines coming up and worrying about whether you can possibly meet them or not.

If you're not sure about whether you can achieve something by the required deadline, what can you do? The answer is to make a plan divided down into tasks, then you can work to your plan calmly knowing you're okay.

There are actually a big number of causes to anxiety and stress but whatever it is, look at it in a positive way and say, ‘It’s not the end of the world. I can still overcome and have things working out my way’.

Another important thing is to learn to avoid procrastination as it leads to a huge pile of activities that eventually cause stress.

Have clear goals and work toward them every day.

Saying "NO!"

A strategy that I really like for reducing the amount of anxiety in your life is to say no to things that you don't like doing and the amount of stuff that you're letting in because if you let in too much than you can handle you'll start to feel anxious.

Get rid of anything that adds more burden and try to reduce the overall amount of commitments that you have by saying no to some of them.

These might be things that you no longer enjoy or things that you have grown old to the point where you don't want to do them anymore.

Saying NO is sometimes a better way to take care of yourself and it’s not selfishness. Looking after yourself has to be done because nobody else is going to look after you.

I actually think selfishness is not just looking after yourself. Selfishness is when you're not prepared to do even a small thing for somebody else when it makes a big difference to them.

So work out what makes you anxious and say no to either things that you don't like or things that have become a burden.

Options to handle difficult people

Now the thing that you can do if somebody is making you anxious is to change how you interact with them.

Rather than just being totally honest there are some bigger options that you've got and I would say let's take a difficult boss; If your boss is making you unhappy at work what can you do?

There are basically different choices, but the best choice is to retrain your boss. And it's the same with colleagues. Retrain them to the point where they behave differently towards you.

You should say to them: it would really help me if you could communicate maybe with me a week before, or it would be nice if I could have a bit more feedback, or could I have a clearer direction of what I'm doing?

I mean, I'm sure they like you and they want you to be happy but they've got lots of other problems and lots of other priorities which they're working on and making you a bit less anxious is way down on their list.

However, if you say it would really help me to do this, there are chances they'll go, “yeah we'll do that”.

A lot of people might say, “well you know my boss is uncommunicative but I'll just do the best I can and you know who cares when I don't? If I'm doing a good job or not; well, I don't know where my career's going or whatever but I'm just not going to care”.

I personally think you should never cease to care about your work environment. You spend five days a week of your life at work and you've got to care about that.

Another option is to live with it, to adapt to them, and just learn to tolerate what they do. So if your boss doesn't tell you what's going on, just think: well that's how it is but it's fine. I'm gonna carry on because I like my job and I'm proud of it and I'm doing a good job and I care about it.

Daily routines

Another really important aspect of handling anxiety is to get your daily routines right.

These are fundamentals you probably do but there might be something in here that you don't know about.

• First of all, get enough sleep. Apparently most people, especially the youth, don't get eight hours. What they do is staying up late and once they feel fine the next day, they say, aha I can always get away with it, until stress pops in.

• Exercise again has huge benefits and you don't have to be a sort of epic marathon runner or something but you could just go for a 10 minutes jog around the block or maybe get some weights that you can jump up and down to a video or music, or just take up dancing classes. There's loads of fun in some types of exercise once done regularly; three times a week perhaps might help.

• Reduce alcohol as well. Alcohol is different to caffeine because caffeine makes you more sort of hyper. Alcohol is more of a downer and it affects you the next day with hangovers. Reducing the amount of alcohol you drink or maybe not drinking it during the week might be something you could think about if you're feeling anxious generally.

Other things you can do routinely are: drinking enough water, prayer (if you are a believer) and listening to some good music too. Not forgetting that when the situation gets worse, you can seek help from a professional therapist.

Disclaimer: This article is based upon the writer’s opinion. Got from his own experience!