Now Be Determined

Did you know that having an anxiety disorder is proof that you are strong?

It’s true.

If you were the kind of person to just give in to your symptoms – to completely surrender to them and say “I can’t do this anymore, Anxiety…..do your worst to me…I give up”, your anxiety could not exist because your anxiety needs your resistance to it in order to survive.

And you are definitely resistant.

You aren’t surrendering to anything.

You are tough. You feel a very strong, primal urge to hate your anxiety symptoms and rebel against them. You aren’t going to lie around and play dead. You want to fight your anxiety with everything you have and that is a sign of great strength!

Don’t ever buy into the attitude of “I have anxiety. I can’t handle anything. I am weaker than everybody else.” It just isn’t true and you do a great disservice to yourself when you tell yourself those lies every day. Anxiety disorders have nothing to do with weakness and everything to do with a strong spirit, a strong will to live, and a very strong sense of self-preservation.

However, the problem with all of this wonderful strength of yours, is that your anxiety doesn’t know that IT is what you are fighting.

It is true that in the beginning, your anxiety symptoms were brought on by some other stress in your life, but as the disorder progresses, your anxiety starts to become less about that initial trigger and more about the symptoms of adrenaline that were brought on by that initial trigger.

Without realizing it, you start to fear your fear, so to speak, and your fearful reactions to your fear keep getting stronger and stronger as time goes on.

Your anxiety thinks your now very strong reactions, your fear, and your constant worry are about some OTHER terrible thing going on in your life, and it thinks it is partnering up with you like the Goose to your Maverick, being your wing-man and helping you stay prepared for any danger that might come your way.

Your anxiety thinks you and it are on the same team. It thinks it is doing an awesome job keeping you alert and safe from whatever is out there threatening you, and it would be shocked to know that IT is the monster at the end of this book,

Your anxiety will never think anything other than that you are in danger – that something very real is threatening your safety.

Anxiety is a very “on the surface” type of thinker and it doesn’t start digging around to find out why you are in danger. That is for YOU to worry about. You are the one with the nice fancy brain and deep thinking skills. Anxiety’s only job is to keep you ready to handle the danger. It’s a bodyguard. That is it.

Because anxiety is never going to sit down and dive into the how and why of your fear, it is never, ever going to know that it is what is causing you all this distress. As long as you feel this fear, apprehension, nervousness, or panic, your anxiety will not be able to put together that IT is responsible for it, so trying to “fight” against it and “hate it” into leaving your life, is pointless.

That will only fuel your anxiety.

Fight makes anxiety say “Yeah! Let’s get this bad guy!” and it will cause your brain to produce more adrenaline which will only add to your symptoms.

The only way to make things better, is to convince your anxiety that you are not in danger anymore so that it will simply…… leave.

That is the only way out of an anxiety disorder. You have to get your anxiety to see that it isn’t needed so it will vanish away- and only you can do the work that it takes.

Professionals can guide you of course, but they can’t do the work for you. It has to come from you.

Take that strong spirit of yours and all that fighting energy you have and harness it into determination.

Continuing to try to fight your anxiety will only keep you stuck in the anxiety spiral you are in. It tells your well-meaning, but clueless anxiety that there is something TO fight.

But determination ….. now that is what will set you free.

Be determined to show your anxiety that you can handle your life just fine without its constant presence. Eliminate negative thinking. Resist the urge to over-analyze and over-think. Make a point to relax every single day even if you can only manage it for five minutes. Push yourself out of your comfort zone at least once a day, even if it is in the tiniest of ways. Never talk bad about yourself or tell yourself you are weak.

Always keep your eye on the prize – which is you gaining control of your life again. You ARE strong enough to do all of these things. If you weren’t, you wouldn’t have an anxiety disorder in the first place.

Just like a nervous, over-protective mother (and I should know because I am one), your anxiety will start backing off more and more, and coming around less and less as you continue to do all of the things I mentioned above and the things I talk about in my anxiety recovery steps.

When all is said and done, your anxiety will never, ever know that IT was the one thing it was trying so hard to desperately save you from. In fact, when all is said and done and your anxiety goes back to its room in the back of your mind until it is needed again, it will probably be patting itself on the back for all the hard work it did to get you through this awful time in your life.

But its okay. Let anxiety take the credit. You will know the truth.

You will know that YOU are the one who saved yourself. Because you are strong.

This post I am sharing from UncommonHelp.com can help provide you some determination inspiration.

Thanks for reading.

Photo Credit – Man: Pixabay