ANXIETY

 

A certain degree of "anxiety" is essential in our lives. We need to feel energized and revved-up to some degree, or we can't really get out of bed and get going. But for many of us, high anxiety, toxic anxiety is a way of life, and it interferes with our focus, our ability to be creative, to relax and have fun, to be with people... We may have grown up in an "anxious" environment—and being the little energetic sponges that we were as children, we adopted the high-strung attributes of anxiousness and worry our parents were feeding us every day without ever questioning it. It was like the air we breathed. Our culture, in general, is arguably a paranoid and reactive culture of deadlines, traffic, isolation, money worries and long work hours (oh yes, and wars, poverty, genocide...). Being an adult can be stressful - life is filled with suffering as well as beauty - but being an adult also means that we can take responsibility for the full range of choices that we're making—and realize that many of them ARE choices (moveable, changeable, transformable choices). What do we have the power to choose NOT to take on? What's helping us, what's toxic? What are the givens that we need to work on accepting (although this may be very difficult) and what are we holding onto too tightly? Anxiety reduction is about sorting these things out, learning new skills inside and out that will help us first to notice, then to continually refine and transform our "way" of living. 

 

Oh - and there's also: Yoga, Meditation, Exercise, Deep breathing, Less caffeine, Less sugar...   TB