Anxiety Isn't the Enemy... It's Your Bodyguard

Let's be honest. Anxiety has a pretty bad reputation.

It’s fair to say that most of us wish we could simply switch it off… forever. We think life would be easier without the racing thoughts and that constant feeling that something could go wrong.

But here's something that might surprise you, anxiety isn't a flaw of your brain. It's actually one of the reasons our species is still here today.

Thousands of years ago, anxiety kept our ancestors alive. While they were walking through a forest and hearing a rustle in the bushes, their brain didn't stop to ask if it was the wind or a hungry predator. It immediately prepared their body to react.

Your heart gets beat faster. Your muscles tense. Your senses become sharper. Blood flowed to the areas of your body that would help you run or fight.

That isn't a bug in the system. It’s the system working exactly as it is designed.

The problem is that our brains haven't evolved nearly as fast as our world has.

Today, there’s no more threat from wildlife. Instead, our brains react to deadlines, difficult conversations, relationship, finances, etc.

To your subconscious mind, a stressful email and a tiger trigger mostly the same alarm system.

That's why anxiety isn't something we should hate. It's something we should understand.

Anxiety act like a smoke detector. Its only job is to warn you when there might be danger. That's incredibly useful... unless the alarm starts going off every time you make toast.

When anxiety becomes overactive, that’s the point where it stops serving you and starts controlling you.

Instead of helping you to make good decisions, it try to convinces you to avoid  the current challenges, question yourself, or imagine the worst-case scenario before anything has even happened.

We don’t want to eliminate anxiety. The goal is to put it back in its proper role. You want anxiety sitting in the passenger seat, pointing out potential hazards when they're real. You don't want it to grab the steering wheel every five minutes.

This is one of the reasons I love working with the subconscious mind through Hypnotherapy.

Most anxious reactions are connected to past experiences, beliefs, or emotional patterns that were learned years ago. Once we understand where those patterns come from and change the belief around those trigger, we can teach the mind that it doesn't have to sound the alarm for things that aren’t a life threatening danger.

Anxiety will always be part of being human and it has to, because when anxiety works with you instead of against you, it becomes what it was always meant to be: a protector, not a prison.

We can’t be fearless but we can get control back while the anxiety quietly does the job it was designed to do in the first place.