A feeling of worry, mostly nervousness or nervous disorder characterized by a state of excessive uneasiness and disorder and apprehension, typically with panic attacks or compulsive behavior, is referred to as anxiety. Here Deanna Debara, Glamour.com, reflects on how she makes her anxiety work in her favor:

 

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“A few days ago I was settling into my office, getting ready to start work for the day, when I was hit with a familiar wave of anxiety—a heart-racing, mind-spinning sense of dread and unease that gushed from the pit of my stomach to the knot in my throat.

If this had been a year ago, I would have been submerged—so overwhelmed by the anxiety I would have either (a) cried, (b) had a full-blown panic attack, (c) gotten back into bed for the day, or (d) all the above. But today, after a full year of working to change my relationship with anxiety (thanks, therapy!), things are different. I didn’t cry. I didn’t panic. I didn’t crawl back into bed.

This time I turned to the strategy I’ve been using for the past year to make my anxiety work for me rather than let it drag me down. The idea, essentially, is to avoid looking at it as a roadblock, and instead focus on my relationship with anxiety. “When you’re afraid of anxiety, you are going to make it worse,” says Alicia Clark, Psy.D., a licensed psychologist and author of Hack Your Anxiety: How to Make Anxiety Work for You in Life, Love, and All That You Do. This might seem like a crazy idea to anyone who has ever wrestled with the feeling—I have spent my entire adult life doing anything and everything to get rid of it. Antidepressants. Therapy. Floating. Breathing exercises. Yoga. A startling amount of alcohol (and an even more startling number of self-help books). You name it, I’ve tried it.

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But nothing managed to remove the unsettling undercurrent that runs through my life. It seemed the harder I tried to eradicate my ongoing panic, the more anxious I became when I couldn’t. I was convinced my anxiety—the intrusive thoughts, the racing heartbeat, the nagging doubt, the constant fear of failure, the tightness in my stomach, the inability to truly relax (like, ever)—must be a clear indicator that something was very, very wrong with me. As if my inability to deal with it meant I was just too weak to cope.

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“Too much of the information out there is unintentionally scaring people about anxiety because the message is that it’s bad,” Clark says. For years, that was definitely the message I was getting: Anxiety was bad and I must be bad for having it. But now that people have started opening up about their own struggles, I’ve realized it’s not that simple. Plenty of people I consider smart, charming, inspiring, and successful (I’m looking at you, Kristen Bell!) are anxious too.

 

The truth is, anxiety isn’t all bad. With the right mind-set, it can actually be a good thing, Clark says.

There’s science to back this up. Stress—i.e., the heightened sense of arousal you get while wrestling with anxiety—can actually improve performance. It’s a bit like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Too much anxiety can leave you feeling paralyzed, too little and you may be missing out on a dose of kick-in-the-pants motivation. Just the right amount of anxiety, however, can work to your advantage, making it easier to power through a deadline, push yourself at the gym, or step outside f your comfort zone to accomplish your goals. “[This approach] is important because it takes us out of being uncomfortable about anxiety and it has us using it instead,” Clark says. When we think of it as a tool, we can ask what the anxiety might be trying to tell us, she explains.”

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Read More … Article Source: https://www.glamour.com/story/anxiety-can-be-a-good-thing-heres-how-i-make-mine-work-for-me

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