Anxiety, Unlocked...

A few days ago, I stepped into the elevator to leave a building…

I hit Level G and bam..the thing that most people dread happened….

The damn elevator got stuck.

A few seconds in, and I felt a wave of panic… I looked at the other and only person in there with me, giving him the universal look of DO SOMETHING…

Lucky for him, he didn’t have to do very much because the Good Lord heard my cry for help and opened the doors.

Now Im not someone to scare easily, but those few moments behind a pair of frozen metal doors reminded me of something profound:

Anxiety is made up.

OK before you start losing your shit and start composing your rebuttal, just hear me out…

When I reflect on my brief but torturous time in that box, I realised that it wasn’t necessarily being stuck that caused the panic. It was my thoughts…

“How did this happen?”
“What if I never make it out?
“What if I die of a panic attack?”
“I need to get out NOW”

As you can tell, it’s almost like I invited stress upon myself by thinking all these wacky thoughts- when all I needed was a few deep breaths and a little patience for the technical glitch to sort itself out.

Of course, I knew that this wasn’t going to kill me. But logic takes a backseat when the mind is hijacked by imagined disasters.

Truth is: no situation is as bad as our minds make it to be…..

Because an untamed mind is as good as a cranky child in a supermarket- chaotic, dramatic, and never shuts up.

Think of the last time you were hit with an unexpected situation, and went into a downward spiral. It was probably because your mind was out of control with an endless flow of stressful thoughts, which reminds me to mention:

No event in itself causes as much anxiety as the stories we tell ourselves about it. 

If there’s any real hack to easing anxiety, beyond the band-aid of pills, it’s this: Drop the stories and the narratives. And if you must tell yourself a story, choose one that soothes your mind rather than setting it on fire.

In case you missed me last week…

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