Fear Is The Difference Between Anxiety And Excitement
Transforming our negative emotions into positive ones by mentally shifting our perspective greatly enhances our quality of life and chances of success.
It involves a shift from hoping for ease to developing strength that can handle life as it happens.
Anxiety is where hope and fear “coexist.”
While I don’t claim to understand the deep traumas that many people experience, I have personally struggled with anxiety and hypervigilance. I was able to function, but it was hard on those around me, and I often felt exhausted and sought isolation.
Most people experience losses, failures, and abuses at some point in their lives, which can crush their self-esteem and cause them to be in a constant state of fight-or-flight. Trauma is not comparative, as what might seem like a normal childhood to one person can feel like a war zone to another.
The things that can break us down include high-stress jobs where trauma is present, the death of loved ones, sexual abuse, financial loss, bullying, and mental abuse. When these things pile up, it can lead to a fear of life in general, and we may constantly seek safety, security, calmness, and peace.
With calamities comes the hope and anxiety of seeking peace. But peace will never come until let go of a future we can’t control.
Anxiety is often seen as an isolated entity that exists, but it’s actually more like a ghost in the machine. It’s a combination of low self-esteem, fear, hypervigilance, hyper-awareness, inadequacy, rejection, worry, and stress that can manifest in both the physical body and thoughts. It gains power from our minds’ wiring and associations and can affect both the program itself and the hardware.
Anxiety comes from tying traumatic events to the present situation or forecasting negative events into the future. It’s like a divot in our gravity field, where everything gets sucked in by its influence. However, it only exists in our inner universe of brain wiring and gains or loses strength based on how we frame our reality and experiences.
To conquer anxiety, we must first seek to understand it. For example, caring deeply about something can lead to anxiety about its welfare, and when combined with hypervigilance, it can become overwhelming. Veterans often struggle with low self-esteem, hypervigilance, and hyper-awareness after returning to civilian life, which can result in varying anxiety levels.
Understanding the building blocks of anxiety, worry, stress, and fear is the first step in developing resilience for future challenges. By developing self-confidence, self-esteem, calmness, perseverance, persistence, focus, and resilience, we can transform anxiety and worry into excitement and alertness. We can let go of the need for perfection and the attempt to control chaos, which allows us to show up and figure things out.
By developing our own strengths, we can face challenges with confidence and resilience. By thinking in terms of iteration instead of prevention, we remove the anxiety where hope and fear meet.