Anxiety is Town to be passed through

[Lord Jazzinho]

I've not visited these pages in a while so I thought I'd make a little appearance and share this little thought with you all. I've had a very strange, up and down and at times unpleasant couple of months, as I have said before at one stage in my life my anxiety/agoraphobia was so bad that I did not leave my home for 8 years unbroken and in that time I was pretty much always worried and anxious and very small things could really set me off.

So in the last 2 months our cat was ill, thankfully as it turned out not fatally, my mother has lost her social security money each week, we have had a gigantic electric bill, and I mean gigantic! My Nan who's house I live in, died suddenly, we have had to arrange and attend a funeral (my first) and we have had to discuss inheritance which is a little disconcerting when that involves the roof over your head. Now out of all this the thing that caused me the most anxiety was the cat due the uncertainty of the situation. Other than that I have had NO anxiety at all. Now this may sound a little heartless in places but to me my Nan was a tyrant and she in no small part had a lot of responsibility for my anxiety, our relationship was such that the most she could ask from me was civility which is what I gave her.

This little story though illustrates that anxiety does not have to be your destination in life, it can be just a stop on the way, there is more than enough here to test anyones resolve. What I would say however is that anxiety does tend to flourish in uncertainty, the only truly uncertain thing that happened was the cat. From this I have learned the something about anxiety and hopefully it may be helpful to some of you.

You have an incident, that incident sets up a period of uncertainty when hope is pitted against negativity and or reality, this causes you to speculate, the longer this uncertainty fuelled speculation goes on for the more anxious you become. If this kind of situation persists things add themselves to the pile and your anxiety starts to become a monster. What I have done in the period after the 8 years in the house is examine my condition and learn to notice precisely what things trigger my anxiety, once identified I set about eliminating them from my daily life, things like watching the news and such, then I asked myself why do these things cause me anxiety?

What I found was the more I understood the problem the easier it was to combat and just by thinking about your anxiety in these slightly different terms you shift the focus from emotional to analytical and by doing this you can begin to squeeze out worry. Anxiety would have you only ever think about it, when you start ignoring and pushing it to one side, you begin to get out of the habit then it is remarkable just how quickly and completely it can diminish.ety, once identified I set about eliminating them from my daily life, things like watching the news and such, then I asked myself why do these things cause me anxiety? What I found was the more I understood the problem the easier it was to combat and just by thinking about your anxiety in these slightly different terms you shift the focus from emotional to analytical and by doing this you can begin to squeeze out worry. Anxiety would have you only ever think about it, when you start ignoring and pushing it to one side, you begin to get out of the habit then it is remarkable just how quickly and completely it can diminish.