When no one understands your anxiety it can greatly work in your favor. How? I’ll share with you the important elements in today’s anxiety guy podcast episode. Enjoy!
Why it’s a good thing that no one understands your anxiety
Anxiety is a subject that needs to be sensitively understood, even though there is a generous available of material ready for us to delve into. There are lectures, a whole plethora of books, and lots and lots of research about anxiety. However, as mentioned, there is a human aspect to anxiety too, that just cannot be learned from all the available research and data.
There are many characteristics of anxiety that come directly from patients, diagnosed and undiagnosed. These are the folks that we connect with, talk to, get acquainted with, or listen to. These are the folks that we may love or fight or disagree with.
Science is the best option available to us for comprehension of anything new. However, it can’t inform us about everything – especially about the human side of things. There are certain things that can only be understood when those things are experienced by us via emotions or sensory feelings in reality. Such things can’t be explained in the words that pop out of books, on websites, or via hypothesis or thesis.
Anxiety can be subjective and present itself in unique ways. Each person with anxiety may tend to experience the problem in different ways and with different symptoms. Humans and their experiences cannot be boxed into something that is measurable. This is because for each one of us, our existence and our individual life experiences, tend to be complex, exasperating, and/or mesmerizing. Additionally, each one of us may have a different outcome when dealing with matters between the mind and the heart.
Discussed below are some points which will help you realize, thankfully so; why it is a good thing that no one understands your anxiety.
This helps you to spend more time with yourself and alter the relationship you have with your body and feelings
The source of anxiety is threat sensors that are on the highest alert level. It is important to remember that the perception of psychological injuries – such as shame, rebuff, or humiliation – can bring about feelings that are just as real as feelings aroused by perceived physical injury.
Thoughts that commence as minor aberrations can quickly snowball and alter the entire day for a person with anxiety. Thoughts such as, “What if I forget to thank him in the speech?”, “Have I turned off the stove?”, “What if my car breaks down and I am late?” etc. can keep churning in the head and turn the day upside down. Despite the increased effort and efficiency of organization and preparation, it can turn into ashes once a worry has arisen in a patient’s head. Such worry can often be seen physically – like in the tone of their skin or the strength of their handshake.
The thoughts often tend to be reasonable, rational, and probable, but the associated anxiety can make them overpowering.
Since communicating with an anxiety disorder patient can trigger anxiety, most people with anxiety become more responsible about whom they let into their inner circle. If you do not meet their parameters of friendship, they may put up a wall whenever they encounter you. They are generally not rude about putting up the wall as they continue to remain your acquaintances. Such decisiveness can go a long way in dealing with anxiety that no one understands. Those people who are able to enter the fortress of patients should feel grateful as people with anxiety generally develop a lovely and safe temperament as a positive side effect of increased responsibility.
This gets you to understand yourself and how you developed anxiety better
Anxiety can provoke thoughts and feelings that can be maddening, terrifying, and overwhelming. To top it all, they can be very powerful. These thoughts can exert more influence than the knowledge offered by doctors, or the knowledge gained by them throughout their lifetime. It is not sufficient to know that there is nothing to fret about. Once the anxiety-ridden mindset has taken over, it will drive the patient’s behavior and trigger feelings of panic and fear, etc. All the worldly knowledge about the reality, legitimacy, validity, or likelihood of a possible event/outcome will not make a dent in the thoughts that keep swelling. When the mind works against the mind, a person with anxiety can only fall back on past learning.
Anxiety can make a person take on more responsibility for his/her life. It makes the person understand the limitations of psychological and pharmaceutical help in dealing with the effects of anxiety that are unique to him/her. Subsequently, people with anxiety dedicate more time to trying and understand themselves better. This is more so when they regularly encounter others who do not truly get it. Increased time spent on self-awareness also leads to a better understanding by patients of how they developed anxiety, the aspects of their lives that trigger anxiety, and factors that exacerbate the associated panic, fear, etc.
This helps in the way that you become more comfortable with uncertainty and the unknown
People may sometimes concurrently experience feelings that are radically opposed to each other. Scientifically, such feelings can never co-exist and the incidence of such a possibility is impossible. However, such contradictory feelings do really co-exist in people with anxiety and occasionally the conflicting feelings may elicit the same response in patients.
For example, people with anxiety may desire to be alone and isolated, while at the same time they may also want to be around people simultaneously. Similarly, people with an anxiety disorder may experience fear of being lost and forgotten, while simultaneously fear of being excessively important and readily accessible. If you suffer from anxiety you may have come across family or friends who say “I just can’t comprehend what it is that you want?” when experiencing an episode of such differing feelings.
But you should not fret when none in the family or friend circle ‘get it.’ It is more likely that they really do not have a clue about what’s going on with you. Since others will rarely be able to understand your anxiety, you should take the opportunity to teach and attune yourself to ride out the episode of uncertainty with comfort and ease.
This helps you to not rely on others so much
Anxiety has been known to convince individuals to take as much control as feasible over the many ‘unknowns’ in life, thereby avoiding any probable commotion that may occur in the near and far future. Thus, people on anxiety tend to rely more on themselves than others. They are the ones to ensure the fruition of a plan or event without any unwarranted glitches. People with anxiety tend to decide on the right time to leave for timely arrival to a place; on the ‘right’ place of the meeting/get-together; the ideal ways to travel to the destination; and the things that need to be brought along to the meeting.
People with anxiety will also make additional arrangements such as having spare coins, a spare sweater, and a spare mobile charger.
Due to the self-reliance of anxiety patients, they also tend to gain emotional intelligence over time. They tend to be kinder, funnier, stronger, and more thoughtful. Due to their increased sense of possible threats, they also tend to be more sensitive towards the feelings of people around them. They will ask for opinions from others; they will know what can’t be said and what’s fine to say, and they will be aware of things that need to be done to alleviate the pain of people around them.
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