Find What You're Looking For

Use positive rationalisation and willpower and refrain from giving your anxiety any undeserved attention. By second guessing your emotional state, you’re actually choosing what mindset to be in when the event or scenario arises. Yes, you’ll probably be anxious at the time of making a plan, but like I explained before, you should just do it anyway. You don’t know how you’ll feel in a years time, a weeks time, an hours time or even a minutes time. I realise that I’m anxious, but maybe the party this weekend will take my mind off of it. I may find that I actually have fun! Stop researching your symptoms on the internet! As anxiety sufferers, we can forgive ourselves for trying to find the answers to a problem that we’re confused and worried about. Unfortunately, many of us turn to the internet for our answers. You must remember that when you type your symptoms into a search engine, you are entering data into an almost entirely pure market space. Almost the entire internet is a capitalist fuelled world, where people buy and sell products, services and information. You’ll be aware that the world around us presents us with a variety of advertising and selling techniques usually revolving around the concept of false need instead of want. Unfortunately, one of the most commonly used and easiest methods in marketing is the practice of scaremongering people and using them as the target market. As an anxiety sufferer, it’s a very common behaviour to type in our symptoms into search engines as a measure of providing relief from our panic and the feeling of being isolated.

Do Yourself A Favour

Sadly, this is where many businesses have formed a target market. We as anxiety sufferers are in need of help and many online businesses see this as an opportunity to sell their products, where the legitimacy of them is always under scrutiny. You may have found that symptoms such as heart palpitations are directly linked to a heart defect. Chest pains are almost certainly a sign of angina and chest problems. Although there are plausible links to these extreme cases, probability tells us they are simply the uncommon, worst case scenario with the odds being further heightened by the fact that you have anxiety. Of course I find the vast majority of forum members and bloggers are found to be perceptibly kind and opinionated. However, when we’re anxious we are easily drawn to the negative scenarios due to the underlying fear and adrenaline that drives us to find a solution to our problems. People can be quick to share an extreme story about someone they know or have heard about. Stories that are way out of the norm draw immediate interest. Blogger A writes about how a woman he once knew collapsed and died after having a headache at work. Or how Forum Member 1 explained how his friend once had a heart palpitation leading to his heart exploding. These types of stories are prominent at the top of search engines as anything out of the norm gains large amounts of interest.

Hunting High And Low

Stop using search engines to find the answers to your symptoms, unless you use a logical and rational approach. The internet isn’t all full of tripe like that mentioned above, but just be careful when deciphering legitimate information and unethical sales pitches. If you’re looking for something then you’ll find it. When we’re confused about an anxious state we find ourselves in, we often look for a reason to attach to the unexplained anxiety. We can often fall into bad habits as explained before, such as body checking, focusing on harmless symptoms, or even using our imaginations to conjure irrational dangers in our outside environment. There are also many other things that we seem to point the finger of blame towards. Such blame can revolve around our personal and social lives, as well as us questioning our own mental health. This behaviour can easily become obsessive, but often disguises itself in a normal daily routine. When we obsess, particularly when it relates to anxiety, we almost always think we have the right conclusion in our minds, but we’re just searching for clarification or evidence to justify it. For example, when we feel anxious, we can often find ourselves trying to think our way out of anxiety. When this approach doesn’t seem to work, we can easily conclude that something must be wrong with our minds. However, we’ve already had our minds made up that something is wrong, because why else would we try to think our way out of anxiety? We’ve already assumed that something is wrong because why would we do something so irrational as to search for a miracle thought to rid us of anxiety? This type of obsessive thought can be applied to when we try to analyse our symptoms too.

All Quiet On The Western Front

Take heart palpitations for example. If we convince ourselves that something is wrong with our heart, we can often find ourselves obsessing and focusing intensely on the rhythm and beating of the heart. Almost every person’s heart beats out of a predictive rhythm at least once a day and it passes unnoticed. However, to the obsessive anxiety sufferer it becomes highly noticeable and immediately a problem. The anxiety sufferer assumes there’s something wrong with the heart and so sets out to find a reason to justify the assumption. They find the reason to attach to the way they feel without realising that all they were feeling was just anxiety. In a nutshell, obsessing about something that frightens you, with regards to anxiety, means you’ll more than likely find what you’re looking for. When you begin to notice differences in your anxiety levels, particularly when they become less intense, you can begin to give them a rating in terms of intensity and how anxious you feel at a given time. This really helps when it comes to looking at your anxiety comparatively and you can use it to measure and acknowledge how you’re progressing.