Living with an anxiety of anticipation means not being able to breathe because uncertainty and worry take your breath away is being the victim of a hasty spirit that strives to bring the most fatal results.
Few experiences are as disabling as feeling blocked by this constant anguish, in which our bodies and thoughts are filled with fear.
- If we could simply describe what anticipation anxiety is.
- We would basically say that it is a mechanism by which the mind tries to predict the future and creates a negative projection to a fact that has not yet occurred.
Why are we doing this?
To answer this question, we need to understand two very simple aspects that define most of us.
For example, such common realities as dealing with a job interview, an exam, a doctor’s appointment or just wondering if we can pay all the bills next month often leads us down a mental path where only deaths grow.
We anticipate the worst and this idea blocks and erases all our resources to face any challenge or goal.
“Anxiety doesn’t eliminate tomorrow’s pain, it just removes the strength of today. – Run ten Boom-
People spend much of their time worrying, which is not always a problem in itself, if these concerns are adequately addressed.
In what way? By using a fair and balanced level of anxiety, we can set this combined alert level in our favor and, in addition, we can have a flexible and positive mental approach to dealing with the difficulties of everyday life.
However, achieving this is not always that simple. And it’s not that easy because our brain is controlled first by instincts, not by reason. Something like this makes, for example, in the face of a situation of uncertainty, our imagination tent to anticipate the worst.
This feeling of anxiety immediately stimulates the amygdala, the region of the brain linked to the circuit of fear and responsible for the “shooting”. A whole chain of physiological responses by releasing hormones like cortisol.
The reason why some people, and not others, end up developing anticipatory anxiety could be exactly related to this structure. Research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison published in the journal Nature indicates that there are more “reactive” brains of uncertainty and threat. .
In other words, there are people who, from a neurological point of view, tolerate such situations much worse and therefore react with a lot of anxiety.
Living with anxiety is not living. It is to be paralyzed in an antechamber in which the mind works to predict the future and at the same time whisper the terrible consequences that can happen.
No matter what you’ve designed, no matter what you have to do today, tomorrow or five years from now, everything will go wrong.
Horcio, the great Latin poet, said that adversity has the gift of awakening talents that, in prosperity, have fallen asleep.
Our reality and the world in which we find ourselves are marked, very often, by unforeseen changes, by pressures, by people beyond our control and by small and great adversities that we are forced to face.
However, no one taught us to do all these things, our brain doesn’t even seem prepared to assume so much uncertainty, so fear is normal.
On the other hand, letting fear overwhelm us is not, the key to not living anxiously in advance and gaining well-being is to reflect on these aspects:
In conclusion, we can all suffer from anxiety in advance at some point, many of the contexts in which we live can normally lead to the demon of fear of reaching us.
Therefore, falling into these states does not weaken us, in fact, it gives us the opportunity to become stronger people, we can become spirits who learn to apply new resources and better skills to live happily ever after.