フレイザー2020年11月号はこちらからどうぞ
Where does anxiety come from? The definition of anxiety is a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome. Let's see if we can understand this logically.
Anxiety starts with something you put your focus on that's unsettling, or something that you experienced comes back to your mind and something about that experience gives you uneasy feeling. Let's give you an example. You went for lunch with your friend. During lunch, your friend mentions there was a house that got broken into in her neighbourhood. You always lock the door properly when you go out, but all of a sudden you started to wonder if you actually locked the door before you came here. The enjoyable hour turned into blur moments and you stopped hearing what your friend is saying. Now your full focus is about whether you locked the house or not. Your stomach is starting to feel weird. This is the anxiety. You started imagining your house getting broken into. "Oh, I might have left 400.00 my husband gave me on the table carelessly." You start to worry if you forgot to put away the diamond earrings his parents gave you. Right now, in your mind, the whole house is getting robbed. You feel you're filled with anxiety and you end up cutting your lunch with a lovely friend short to run home. You get home with full of anxiety. The house is properly locked. The cash you thought you left on the table is neatly put away in a drawer. Your beautiful earrings are in the jewelry box in the bathroom. Nothing happened. The imagination that runs wild with a trigger. This, is the biggest ingredient of anxiety. And your body can't recognize whether this is the imagination or something that actually happened and give you the emotions or even symptoms based on that imagination as if this was real.
So what can you do? The first step is to notice what the trigger is for the anxiety. And accept the fact that you're imagining. Accept it but never blame yourself for imagining. There is no need to blame your amazing imagination. That's your power. It is only natural to worry about your house if you hear someone's house getting broken into. But you do need to stop your imagination getting out of your hands. Because it's not necessary. In this exact present moment, the moment you're enjoying lunch with your friend, this imagination just gets in the way. No one can see the future. It is 50/50 chance for your house to be safe or get broken into. When you are imagining the scene of your house getting broken into, you are feeling fear and anxiety, completely out of present moment. But when you never doubt the safety of your house, you stay in the present moment, enjoying every minute of the time with your friend.
Intuition and anxiety are two very different things. What you can do with anxiety logically is to not doubt yourself. You don't need to always think of the worst case scenario. When something bad happens, you would deal with it then. It is always 50/50 chance that something good or something bad happens. So we don't need to always assume or fear the bad things will happen. Your amazing imagination is the power to lead you to a better life. Decide that your life is always going to a better direction. Welcome the great, unknown future and avoid imagining the bad, horrible possibility. Focus on the present and live in the moment. I hope your imagination will help you improve your life instead of preventing you to enjoy the "now".
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