Anxiety & Your Emotions

I've reached a lot of breaking points with my anxiety and have come to realize that it is a part of me. When I tell my stories I realize that I mention a lot of dark times, as in multiple, as in these breaking points happen often. I've learned that this is really just me boiling over. Anxiety, hurt, anger, fear, any negative emotion, is not meant to be kept inside of you. Eventually it will break you down.

It's so easy to live your life focused on your responsibilities and and surface level drama that is your daily life, but unfortunately for all of us, that's very unhealthy. We all have deep-rooted beliefs about ourselves and others that effect our everyday lives without us even noticing.

So what should we do? Practice mindfulness. The more you stuff and overlook your emotions, the more likely you are to break, and the bigger the break will be when it comes. I find myself reflecting everyday now. Reflecting on past experiences, reflecting on new experiences and how past experiences have shaped my current reality. If everyday we can pull back another layer into our past and into the reasons why, we might be able to hack this whole mental breakdown thing.

How can we do it? Start small. When a negative emotion comes up for you, ask yourself why. Why am I angry right now? Why did that comment hurt me? I invite you to take full responsibility for that emotion, after all, you're the one having it... Once you establish a pattern of why, so as though it becomes a habit, then start to dig deeper. So after you ask yourself why, ask yourself what has happened before that leads me to believe this now.

Here's an example:

The Situation: Your boyfriend is an hour late coming home from work.

Your Gut Reaction: You instantly feel agitated and want an explanation so you're just going to ignore him until he asks for forgiveness.

What REALLY Happened: There was an accident on the freeway and he was dead stopped. His phone was left in his briefcase so he couldn't get to it to call you.

Ask yourself WHY? You're upset because you think he's cheating on you.

Dig deeper, why do you think that? Because your ex used to show up late to dates and things and it turned out that he was cheating on you at the time.

This may seem petty and you may be now telling yourself, that the new boyfriend is different so you should just move on. Guess what? The issue is deeper than that. Congratulations though, you've identified the problem at this point and that's more than most people can say.

What do you do now? You heal that life event that has created a negative emotion in you now. This is where meditation and self care really comes in. If you haven't read some of my previous blogs on self-care for ideas on what might work best for you. What I've learned works best though, is to meditate on the negative emotion and the event that causes it to come up time and time again in your life now.

Remember, like everything, it's a practice and it will take time but that time isn't wasted because every minute you spend being mindful is working against the pent up negative emotions that might eventually hurt you even worse.