Things you need to know about anxiety

Living with anxiety can be exhausting, frustrating, and painful. This is the most common, natural, and complex emotion we feel when we are in psychological distress. To manage your anxiety, the first step is to understand this emotion. So what is anxiety?

In Urdu, anxiety is called a condition of Iztarab, Baychaini, Ghabrahat.

Anxiety is your mind and body’s natural response to stress, fears, uncertainty, unfamiliar situation, or apprehension about what’s to come. When you feel anxiety, you also experience uneasiness or distress feelings. The anxiety experience is different for everyone because personalities, life experiences, thought processes, belief systems, culture, and physiology are different. However, the common expression of anxiety is expressed as an unsettling feeling.

Anxiety is an emotion which has emotional experiences and physical sensation. So in an emotional experience, you might feel sad, down, low, distracted, defocused. When you feel physical sensations, you might sweat, you will feel headache, your heart will pound, and you will experience fatigue, etc.

Anxiety also acts as a secondary emotion because you experienced anxiety instead of another emotion that is difficult for the person to feel or express. Anxiety can be a cover of hurt, jealousy, disappointment, embarrassment, sadness.

Anxiety is a mixture of different emotions and thoughts like fear, anger, sadness, etc., and our thought process causes these feelings. I express my feeling of anxiety as a tangled, colourful thread that has other emotions as well. It represents that I am feeling anxious as a cause of other emotions. When I try to untangle this thread, it has other emotions like confusion, anger, etc., which cause my thought process or fears.

Anxiety is also an expression of other emotions. You experience the intensity of other emotions like fear, anger, frustration, confusion, insecurity, sadness through anxiety in your body. So anxiety is usually sparked by other emotions evoked or filled with thoughts, memories, and images that have become subconsciously linked with those emotions. When these emotions and thoughts are tangled, you will feel anxious.

It is a cause of problematic or unsettling situations. If you face a challenging or distressful situation in your life, then dealing with that situation can cause you anxiety. Problematic situations mostly bring a lot of stress, mental and physical fatigue, confusion, helplessness, feeling of being stuck, and a combination of these feelings can blur your thoughts, can make your mind clouded. Feeling anxious in this situation is very common because anxiety usually draws your attention towards that bigger problem that might threaten your life, mental and emotional security.

In which situations we feel anxious? There are different situations when we feel anxiety, and reasons can be different from person to person. I am highlighting few situations and putting these situations in 4 categories.

You feel anxious when you experience fear, danger, threat: Fear of uncertainty, financial insecurity, unknown, failing in life or exams, being alone, height, flying, a threat to life, fear of losing family member and friends, fear of losing support, fear of public speaking, fear of losing a job, etc.

General life situations can trigger anxiety: Unstructured life and work, too much work in life, unable to get time for self, missing deadlines, unable to give proper attention to family or home, if a person is experiencing grief, or loss, a trauma in life, accidents, changes in living arrangements, pregnancy or giving birth.

Being self-critical can make you feel anxious: If a person has low self-esteem, self-confidence, low self-worth, they think I am not good enough, or people have made them believe they are not good enough. They are not confident about their appearance, personality, or maturity, if emotional needs are not fulfilled, if they feel rejected, abandoned, cheated, and hopeless.

Living in an unhealthy or critical environment can evoke your anxiety: Continuous critic of your work, continuous sense of judgment, directly or indirectly criticism of your personality, the judgment of your lifestyle, beliefs, norms, if you feel you are not accepted in a certain environment, receiving instructions that you have to behave or act in a certain way, as a person your beliefs about your self is rejected, etc.

The general perception of anxiety or experience of anxiety is that it is a bad feeling, unsettling feeling, alarming feeling related to emotional and physical pain. This perception is developed because anxiety, emotional and body experience is intense. It aches, you experience pounding heart, breathing problem, upset stomach, extremely emotional and body fatigue, increase and decrease in blood pressure, muscle aches, effects on the immune system, insomnia, de-focus, cannot think straight, blur thought, etc.

However, there are positive sides to anxiety which we are not aware of.

Anxiety acts as your defence mechanism. If you sit with this anxiety feeling, it always tells you something to change or protect you from a dangerous situation or a life threat. Anxiety is an adaptation of fear response. Anxious people immediately respond to threats than people who don’t experience anxiety generally in life.

This is the defence mechanism that alerts and protects you from dangerous situations or potential threats. It allows you to make conscious decisions about the presence of danger and how to protect yourself.

Anxiety directs your attention towards problems. Anxiety is a powerful emotion and has an intense impact on your body, mind, and emotion; that is why sometimes you feel that it is difficult for you to focus. Your mind and body are likely trying to divert your focus on a situation that needs to be addressed immediately. It may also give you a sense of what you truly want in your life and help you take action, even if it may be difficult to do so. Anxiety can direct you to see that situation is too serious to ignore. It behaves like a stubborn child; if you don’t listen to its voice, it will keep coming, making you feel distressed, uncomfortable, unsettled until you do something about the situation or a problem. It will keep on deriving your attention towards the unsettling things you are experiencing in your life.

I also believe that anxiety has a strong connection with growth because it always asks you to change and move ahead in your life. So it acts as a catalyst in your growth process. Because of anxiety, you grow in your life; it keeps asking you to remove obstacles, challenges, problems, and negativity in your life and move forward.

Anxiety connects you with the core values that you develop. It acts as a radar to show us what is right and wrong for us. To fully eliminate anxiety would be to eliminating perspicacity and self-awareness. We feel anxious when someone criticises us, talking against our belief/ value system, discriminating against us, bullying us, etc. It helps you connect with your real self and original belief system, which is not influenced by the external environment. When something goes against your value or belief system, it is the anxiety that encourages you to say NO to the situation or behaviour.

By Sumra Anis