Saturday 24 March 2018

How I Transformed My Anxiety and What to Do If You Feel Emotionally Stuck

a post by Dr Eric Tan for the Tiny Buddha blog


“There is still vitality under the snow, even though to the casual eye it seems to be dead.” ~Agnes Sligh Turnbull

For as long as I can recall, I have always been a fretful and anxious person. Mine was a low-key anxiety that’s always colored the background of my life, a constant companion of ambiguous dread and imminent doom (just around the corner!)

The annoying part was that I never quite knew why the anxiety hung around. There weren’t any real situations in my life that evoked this constant, nagging fear.

I have tried various techniques to manage my anxiety. I tried deep breathing. I tried to balance out the fearful thoughts that sometimes follow the feeling of fear with logical investigation of the facts.

I tried self-hypnosis—imagining a safe place in the depths of my psyche protected by multiple layers of force fields. I tried going toward the fear instead of running from it by putting myself in fear-inducing situations, so I could learn to tolerate it better. I tried self-psycho-analysis.

All these produced various small results, but always, always there was something missing. I somehow felt like I did not go all the way to the bottom of my anxiety.

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