What goes on in your mind when you react anxiously and yet you want to react differently than that? Do you think that you can’t help it, or it’s just the way you are, or it’s normal and natural to react the way you do because everyone else is the same way?
No matter which you react, if it makes you feel anxious then it’s fair to say that there is a ‘better’ way to react, a way that doesn’t leave you feeling ‘bad’. Feeling ‘bad’ means that you get to feel bad about something but you don’t get to cure or solve something. You don’t get to find the solution to a problem so it doesn’t ever happen again, you just get to feel bad, now and forever because like playing snakes and ladders, you are stuck on the first square not being able to go any further because you haven’t thrown a six to start.
How Often Do You Repeat The Same Anxious Response?
You’ve seen the film ‘Groundhog Day’ with Bill Murray? I love that film because it’s funny and poignant, but imagine living in that hell of a repeated day forever and unlike our main character never even being able to change things in your present reality- now that would be hell.
But isn’t that what anxiety does, it makes us have hellish days over and over again because we have only one way of coping with that situation and that’s to get anxious, to worry, to ruminate, to catastrophise, to mull over, to analyse, to ponder on, but nothing else ever happens except that.
Nothing changes and if you think back to any anxious producing episode in your life and compare your anxious response then to what it is now, and I can bet you a gluten free fudgy brownie that it will be exactly the same, like time stood still for you but everyone else is getting on with their lives, but you can’t.
For How Long Will You React Like This Until You Realise You’re In A Time Warp?
So what do we do if we find that this is true and we are indeed stuck in a time warp, where everything around us grows, dies, changes, but we stay exactly the same as we were when we were teenagers and we don’t know how to get out of it? Or worse still we don’t even know we are stuck in that matrix and it’s only when someone like me taps you on the shoulder and wakes you up that you realise just what has been happening for 20, 30, 40+ years of your life.
How Do You Typically React To Bad News?
So how would you cope with that? Not how you think you would cope or how you’d like to cope, but given your history how do you typically cope with such bad news, or state of affairs?
- Do you shrug your shoulders and say , oh never mind I can still do something about it?
- Do you say, thank goodness you’ve come Elaine and woken me from my nightmare, now help me make the most of the rest of my life?
- Do you jump for joy and praise to your idea of a God that you have been saved and life will be better going forward?
Chance are you will fight to deny that you even have a choice, that you are different and you can’t change things, that others can change but not you, that it’s too hard, that it’s your upbringing that makes life so difficult, that you’re too old to change, too young, too…. Basically you fight to go back into your matrix where you know exactly what will happen, because you can cope with that, after all it’s what you know.
Someone Please Tap Me On The Shoulder And Wake Me Up!
When I first realised that the same anxiety responses I was having were the same that I had always had, and they never changed, I was shocked. I simply thought that what I thought was coping with the situation wasn’t and so I never really coped well, I just repeated the same behaviour until something distracted me to do it all over again.
And I’d love to say that this only happened for a few short weeks or months of my life, when in fact it was decades before I realised this and it wasn’t pleasant to see either. What a waste.
So the answer to what is the best coping strategies for anxiety is awareness.
Once you are aware that you are in Groundhog Day, you can do something to change things, but if you aren’t aware then you’ll wonder why things don’t change for you but they do for everyone else and never be able to push the button, get off that merry-go-round and start to do something differently.
If you want to change things, become aware, grow, change, develop, achieve, then push the stop button, get off your Merry Go Round and speak to me, I’m here to help.
Here’s to being woken up.
Speak soon
Elaine
