Living with Uncertainty… From Panic FEAR, WORRY, ANXIETY …part 262
Fear, worry, and anxiety are all common reactions to everyday life. But now, in such a time as this, you may notice a spike in your experiences of these emotions.
Each of these emotions are different from one another and your management of them can lead to longer-lasting suffering or a meaningful and enriching life.
Fear is a natural emotional and physiological response to a real, specific threat in your outside world. When we encounter fears, our body naturally responds by going into fight-flight-freeze mode in an effort to keep us safe. This survival instinct can be healthy when there is an actual, real threat.
Worry is natural as well. Observation and assessment of our current situation can allow us the opportunity to anticipate problems in advance and prepare for the worse.
Worry usually has thoughts that begin with, “What if…”. Worrying is easy to do, you can worry about anything you want to worry about.
Unlike fear and worry, anxiety can take a life of its own. Anxiety is usually the result of focusing on things that have already happened in the past or things that may happen in the future.
Anxiety can be a 24/7 state of chronic arousal and muscle tension that is directed indiscriminately and ineffectually toward everything where even small problems can feel like crises.
Panic attacks can be sudden. People experiencing them usually report several overpowering physical, emotional, cognitive, and behavioral symptoms. These attacks typically lasts 10 minutes, sometimes longer. The biggest misconception about having panic attacks is that you are helpless and cannot do anything to stop them. That’s not true, you are not as powerless as you think.
Disclaimer: The information on this POST is not intended or implied to be a substitute for professional advice. The opinions expressed within this article are the personal opinions of the author. All content, including text, graphics, images and information, contained on or available through this article is for general information purposes / educational purposes only, and to ensure discussion or debate.
Thank you …WATCH YOUR THOUGHTS
Your emotions provide you with a signal that something is happening. Your thoughts enable you to connect to your emotions and respond as needed.
Thinking occurs when you experience emotions and thoughts and it allows you to process, navigate, judge, decide, and respond in helpful or unhelpful ways.
It is your thinking that makes it seem as if your thoughts are worse than an actual scary event, so you try to avoid these thoughts in some of the unhealthiest ways, thus giving them more power over you. The more you believe your thoughts over yourself, the more miserable you will feel and miss out on what’s going on around you.
You begin to live in the world your thoughts built, causing your mind to become hypervigilant, where you are constantly seeking out those things that the mind says is true. And when that happens over and over again, the panic ensues.
Want to add word or two?
AWARENESS
So, let’s see how this COVID-19 pandemic has you thinking. Get out a piece of paper and make four columns labeled: “fear”, “worry”, “anxiety”, and “response”.
For the column labeled fear, list out immediate threats to your life; for worry, list out all of your ‘What if’ thoughts; for your anxiety column, write down things that you believe may happen in the future based on what you have been seeing, hearing and experiencing as it relates to COVID-19; and finally, in the response column, write down changes you have noticed in your physical body (e.g. pounding heart, rapid pulse, numbing/tingling), emotional effects (e.g. helplessness, hopelessness, strong desire to escape), and behavioral responses (e.g. increased alcohol/drug consumption, avoidance, hyperventilating).
Your comment ….?
TAKE CARE
It is impossible to not have any emotions such as fear, worry, and anxiety at a time when nothing is like you’re used to; however, you can learn to reduce the impact these experiences have on your daily functioning by choosing to be present.
Instead of judging yourself for having some anxiety, accept that some forms of anxiety can be a component of care and concern about what happens to self and others.
During this pandemic, become aware of what’s causing helpful and unhelpful states of mind to arise and consider:
Breathing and noticing how your body feels with each breath from head to toe
Stretching
Taking walking meditations
Finding ways to let your brain rest
Journaling
Cutting down on information overload
Spending more time alone
Avoiding conflict whenever possible
Learning organizational skills to make your life more orderly and less cluttered
Dumping activities and behaviors that don’t fit with what you find meaningful
Managing Director at DAYALIZE
3 年If during this tough period you’ve lost your job or income, you still have control of how much effort you put into looking for work online, sending out resumes or networking with your contacts. Similarly, if you are concerned for your safety in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic, you should take action by washing your hands frequently, cleaning surfaces, avoiding crowds, and watching for vulnerable friends and neighbours. Accept uncertainty?? ??????????????????????? No matter how much you aspire to remove uncertainties and instability from your life, the fact is that every day you still embrace a great deal of ambiguity. You’re embracing a degree of ambiguity any time you cross a street, get behind the wheel of a car, or eat takeout or restaurant food. You trust the traffic will stop, you won’t have an accident and everything you eat is healthy. In these conditions, the likelihood of something bad happening is low, so you’ll accept the risk and move on without the need for assurance. If you are religious, you typically embrace questions and confusion as part of your religion as well. When irrational fears and worries take hold, it can be hard to think logically and accurately weigh up the probability of something bad happening. Worst is still to come ………………..count down has begun.