Written by Maria Mulone, Life Coach & Hypnotherapy
Maria Mulone is a Certified Life Coach and Registered Hypnotherapist. Her focus is on guiding individuals toward transformative growth and helping them discover their own potential.
It does happen to all of us at times to feel anxious, some people though do experience this feeling more often than others.
Let’s try to understand what is anxiety
Normal/General Anxiety is a psychological or behavioural reaction to any real or perceived threatening situation, symptoms are normal reactions to something perceived as a threat. We are worrying about something that seems too important to let go.
We worry about our job, about our loved ones, about some decision to make, and so on.
This is totally normal and there is nothing wrong with it, but we do not classify feeling anxious as a good feeling and we think that anxiety is the enemy and we need to cure ourselves.
The truth is that Anxiety is a natural part of our human experience, you haven’t got any mental disability, it’s all about being able to manage it, not about letting it disappear.
We do need that sense of alertness, and anxiety let me check if I have the keys in my pocket before leaving my house, it makes me look before crossing the street and so on.
It is an emotion we need in life to survive.
3 simple steps that will help you to manage anxiety
1. Stop being anxious about feeling anxious
Many times, instead of checking what this anxiety is trying to tell us, we only worry that we should not be feeling that way, and this only makes the level of anxiety going up. Accepting the way you feel is the first step, it’s ok don’t fight it.
2. Start listening to yourself
Start listening to what your anxiety is telling you instead of worrying about feeling anxious. Check with yourself what are the causes or triggers of this feeling.
Being in the now and present can help, we worry about the future, about something that we feel might happen but usually never happens.
We can also ask ourselves these 5 questions below to ground us, the scenarios we play in our mind are terrible and probably never going to happen.
Do I know the reason why I feel anxious?
How is this affecting my life?
Is this feeling appropriate now for the circumstances I am experiencing?
Did I fail in the past? (Most of the time the worst-case scenario never happened)
Is there something I can do to change the circumstances? (Many times there is nothing we can do and worrying about it won’t change the circumstances)
3. Be kind to yourself
Being harsh can cause low self-esteem and create even more anxiety for the future when the slightest challenge comes. The simple decision to speak differently to yourself can change your situation. Build yourself up instead of beat yourself up.
Read more from Maria Mulone
Maria Mulone, Life Coach & Hypnotherapy
Maria is a Life Coach and Hypnotherapist. She thrives by helping people boost their self-esteem and unleash their inner power, helping them achieve their goals. She has always felt the urge to help others and discovered throughout her life that the only way to build a beautiful life is to start with self-love.