How anxiety can change your life for the better? Huh? At first glance this seem like an oxymoron. We all know that anxiety is bad for you, that it can result in all kinds of physical and emotional symptoms, ranging from heart attacks to a debilitating fear of social contact.
This is all true, of course. What I’d like to talk about today is how you can use anxiety to actually grow and develop, and how it can help you along your spiritual journey.
Tip # 1: Look fear in the face.
Anxiety is just another word for fear. It can be very low- level fear, particularly in the case of mild anxiety. So when you feel anxious, the first step is to ask yourself, ‘what am I afraid of’?
If you suffer from social anxiety for example, maybe you’re afraid that no one will like you. So you hide in order to not face that fear. The problem with this is that you never get to see the truth.
Tip # 2: Be willing to face the truth.
The next step is to ask yourself what is actually true in this situation. To use the above example, if you have a belief that says no one will like me, ask yourself what is true, as you know it, about that statement.
If it’s true that no one will like you, then it has to be true that no one has ever liked you up till now. Since that is doubtful, maybe the truth is you simply don’t know if people will like you. This is a far cry from the original belief, no one will like me.
Tip # 3: Be willing to hang out in the unknown.
For some reason we humans are extremely adverse to being in the unknown. Which is ironic since we never know what will happen in the future anyway. The unknown is simply the nature of reality.
So we concoct all kinds of negative beliefs about our selves and the world in order not to face this fact about the unknown. To again use the above example, we would rather believe that no one will like us than to look at the truth, which is we simply don’t know, in a given situation if we’ll be liked or not. Just as we don’t know if we’ll like someone else or not.
Tip # 4: Accept the fear of the unknown and let go of anxiety.
Look directly into this fear of the unknown and be willing to simply rest there. Breathe into it. Make friends with the unknown. It’s a basic fact of life and is, I believe, the root of all anxiety.
If you can become even a bit more accepting of the reality of the unknown, you’ll be surprised at how much of your anxiety will simply dissolve, and how much more accepting of yourself you can become.