Strategies to overcome the ‘What ifs’
Anxiety can be described as fear, worry, panic, dread and a feeling of tension and apprehension. The physical symptoms of anxiety may include heart palpitations, breathlessness, headaches, feeling faint, dizziness or jumpiness or “flat-out” exhaustion.
Before we break free from the tight grip anxiety has over our lives, it is important to understand the root causes of anxiety. What exactly are the key triggers driving us to feel anxious? Firstly, anxiety can be caused by a perceived threat. One suffers from anxiety when one considers one’s life to be in danger or feels that somebody is out to cause harm or damage. The perception of an imminent threat can cause an individual to lose all sense of cognitive functions and cognitive reasoning
Secondly, anxiety is caused by the feeling in being in an unsafe environment. During the covid 19 pandemic, the fear of disease transmission drove nations of people to panic buying, hoarding and solitary confinement because they were anxious that their lives were at risk with the rising number of fatalities as they perceived their local towns and cities and the general public to be unsafe. Even today, many people are still feeling anxious to venture out of their houses for fear of being infected by Covid 19.
Self-esteem is another major cause of anxiety. The media gives a false perception of what the perfect male or female body needs to look like. When individuals feel that they don’t measure up to the world's expectations of what the perfect body needs to look like, it is very easy for those same individuals to lose their self-confidence. People have a tendency to become very anxious about presenting themselves in public, which leads to self-withdrawal. Thoughts spiral out of a control, and people reject themselves and convince themselves that they are unlovable and unacceptable, which is not true. On the contrary, the truth is you are beautifully, fearfully, and wonderfully made by the Creator.
Breaking free from the tight grip of anxiety involves identifying the threats, the unsafe environments and the roots of your low self-esteem which leave you feeling anxious. Let us have a look at the following reflection questions to help explore this.
Identify what makes you uneasy and apprehensive.
How do these feelings of dread affect you physically?
In the next blog, we will be identifying other factors which help increase our awareness of the root causes of anxiety.
