How to Make Your Anxiety Work for You Instead of Against You

Some people naturally have too much anxiety, those that have the Need to be right, have control, success and power. They orchestrate everything around them, and are mistrustful or suspicious, being scared of inadequacy, failure, being insignificant, or being taken advantage of.

You have too much anxiety if you tend to expect respect and admiration, are frustrated a lot, question the motives of others, and are overly impatient.

Too little anxiety isn’t good either. This would have you put your head in the sand in the face of change. Not wanting to take risks, valuing status quo and enabling a bubble.

You have too little anxiety if you’re too idealistic and cautious, detaching from all of the change around you. The world is changing faster than our ability to adapt. We need to learn new things, and can’t stay complacent for long.

It’s important to allow yourself to stretch and to feel just the right amount of anxiety.

Just enough anxiety like Eustress can be a productive energy. Living with the right amount of anxiety provides just enough tension to drive you forward without causing you to resist, give up, or try to control what happens.

The first step is getting comfortable being uncomfortable. The goal is to live a full life, and sometimes you’ll have good days and sometimes bad days. Develop the skill of being uncomfortable. Knowing you can and will get through it is important.

Your body would give you signs to alert you of any anxious feelings. Ask yourself why you’re anxious. Is it because you’re excited? How you interpret anxiety could be good or bad. If you’re about to give a speech, for example, anxiety is good. Instead of trying to avoid it, understand it.

When you have too much anxiety, it’s often because you’re telling yourself a story. It’s often not the event that causes anxiety; it’s the story we tell ourselves about it.

When this happens, take a long walk or breathe deeply if you have too much anxiety. You can get a sense of the source of the anxiety, peel back the onion, and find the cause.

All change happens in the gap between our current reality and desired future. We have a problem we want to solve or have a goal we want to accomplish. In the gap sits our motivation, our engagement, and our anxiety. Anxiety is the energy that moves us across the gap. We need to have enough energy to change.

You can’t change or transform yourself unless you allow yourself to feel uncertainty and vulnerability.