The Circle of Anxiety; Attempting to Break The Norm

Anxiety affects us all, there's no doubt about it. The problem, however, is that anxiety affects some more than others. It can become a huge part of a person's life; something that holds you back, stops you from achieving particular goals or taking potential risks.

Anxiety is something I've had for as long as I can remember. There's not a moment in my childhood that I can think of that anxiety didn't play a small part in, whether it's simply socialising or and everyday activity at school. Growing up, anxiety becomes something you're much more aware of. It's something that you begin to understand, but having an understanding is far different from combating it.

At its core, anxiety is a natural defence mechanism. It's a fight-or-flight response due to our old fundamental instincts. Something makes you uncomfortable, and your natural defence mechanism tells you to fear it, to want to avoid it. Of course, in modern-day society, a lot of the anxiety is certainly different to having a natural instinct telling you to escape the dangers of a wild animal or dangerous activity. Most anxiety will be a result of some form of social activity.

Simply knowing that is enough to begin to fight back at it, but it's not enough to fully deal with it. In honesty, it's something that'll forever linger alongside you. But there are ways to adapt to it, to further understand it and control it under certain circumstances. Here's the circle of anxiety, under some amazing art skills and taking into consideration a social environment:

Understanding the root causes of your anxiety can help you skip over the cycle of fear, negative thoughts, and the inevitable panic leading up to the social event. Once you reach ANXIETY, you can ask yourself what exactly is causing you to reach FEAR, applying logic to the upcoming NEGATIVE THOUGHTS. By doing so, PANIC can be removed entirely.

Applying more thought to the reasons behind your anxiety can help outside of social environments. Here's how it can impact your productivity:

It sounds far easier than it can be, I know, but as time progresses, and the more you apply rational thought towards your anxiety, eventually it can reduce the time in which you feel fear, and can easily remove the feeling of fight-or-flight. While the circle always resorts back to anxiety over time, I've noticed that my periods in which I feel stuck drastically reduced.

In short: you're far more intelligent than you realise. Anxiety is a natural instinct; it'll never disappear, but it can be properly understood. Freeing your mind of the negative thoughts to ask yourself why exactly you are having those thoughts in the first place can help you find solutions.