In this post, I wanted to explore how to live with anxiety and exactly how I live with it and have done it for many years now. When you’ve suffered from anxiety and low mood for as long as I have, you start to pick up ways of dealing with these things. I think that it’s important that you read my story here if you haven’t already and then come back over and finish reading this article. I think it’s important because I want you to get an idea of where I’ve been and maybe you’ll be able to relate and so we’re all a bit more familiar.
Either way, I want to show you how I love with anxiety on mostly a daily basis. Like everyone, I have good days and bad days. Sometimes I feel a lot more anxious than others however I deal with it when it pops up. I never used to be able to deal with feeling so low and anxious, and maybe you know the feeling, especially if you’ve been suffering a while.
Living With Anxiety: 1. Talk To People
In a way, it’s kind of funny me having this one of the ways to live with anxiety. I say that because I was the shiest kid you’d ever met. Little did I know, I wasn’t really that shy but instead I was highly anxious which stopped me from being forward with people. It literally stopped me from the age of about 5 years old. Pretty sad right?
It sucks because I was under its control from a young age but I suppose the good thing about growing us is, you learn from your past. I say that you should talk to people because there’s nothing worse than being on your own when you’re anxious. I know that’s true for me.
When you’re highly anxious, you may not want to talk to people or be around anyone else because you might feel out of place like I used to. Talking and being around other people is one of the best ways to get over your anxiety at that moment. When you can be ‘out of your head’ and not on your own dwelling on your thoughts, you can start opening up to people and put your mind towards something else.
I know that when I’m on my own thinking or if I’m not working on something like this website or my YouTube channel, I start to let my mind wander and I start to worry about things that I don’t need to worry about or things that are irrelevant. I’ve said before that Projectenergise.com is very therapeutic for me, and it truly is.
2. Do What You Love
I’ve said it before but I need to say it again. Do what you love. Although you may be feeling anxious, fed up and probably depressed, everyone has something that they love to do. Obviously, for me, I like writing and drawing. When I’m doing these things, I feel de-stressed and I let my mind get right into the flow.
I know it can be difficult. I’m a dad of a lively, bouncy 4-year-old and I struggle to find the time to get work done that I love. I find a way however to make sure I do what I love to do because I know that my mind needs it to stay energized and upbeat.
Hey, if your passion is hiking then you’ve got the benefit of nature and fresh air too! The point is, I believe in doing what you naturally enjoy to help stimulate your brain. We have so many responsibilities every day that we neglect what our minds and our hearts truly want. Because of this, we start having regrets that we never did start doing what we truly love. This then adds to the anxiety we feel and it can end up feeling like a bug cycle of anxiety….
I’m not saying that you have to quit your job and fly off to another country to do volunteering or whatever it is you love. I’m just saying that giving yourself a chance to get stuck into something that you really enjoy can work wonders. Sometimes just planning that breakaway is enough to keep you buzzing for a long time.
3. Understand AND Believe That You’re Not On Your Own
Learning that I wasn’t the only one who felt anxious as hell was a huge push for me towards feeling better about being anxious all the time.
It’s kind of funny because when you’re living with anxiety it can feel like you’re the only one in the world going through it. When I realized that a lot of the people I knew had bad anxiety as well, it made me see that it’s no that rare, I wasn’t an outcast and that this is something real that people actually go through all the time.
So, you need, yes need, to realize that half the world feels highly anxious and in this day and age, the stigma is dropping quickly. Lots of celebrities and sportspeople are revealing that they’ve had bouts of anxiety and depression and I think that’s really [powerful for young people to see when they’re feeling lost like I used to.
This also brings me back to ‘talking to people’. After I’d talked to my mum, and she told me she’d suffered too for a long time, that’s all it took for me to understand that I wasn’t on my own.
4. Start Believing In Yourself
Back in the day when I felt like I was going nowhere because I couldn’t imagine a time when I wouldn’t feel the way I felt, It was difficult to believe in myself and push myself towards doing anything worthwhile.
When you’re living with anxiety, you get stuck in your head and even worse, you get stuck in the present whilst you worry about the future. I have always worried about my future, but mostly when I was a kid. Where would I work? Would I have a girlfriend? Would I bee poor? These are the types of questions a kid was asking himself when he should have been enjoying himself.
When you start to believe in yourself and you realize that you can actually achieve anything you want, it can make you wake up a bit. I say a bit, it can, in fact, help you WAKE UP BIG TIME. I’ve overcome lots of hurdles in my life already and many of them have been personal battles like feeling like I’m worthwhile, getting over crippling anxiety and being a good parent that doesn’t put his fears on his children.
Another example is projectenerigse.com. It took a lot for me to finally get this website up and going because I was procrastinating over it. It was also a big deal for me to reveal to the world how anxious I had been and generally how people would respond. However, it’s only been in the last few years I’ve had a real surge of self-belief.
Once I understood the things that I’ve been talking about. I realized that lots of people have anxiety, I’m not on my own and I don’t want to not do what I love. And so, I’m doing just that.
One day I bought website hosting and a domain name and I just started writing what was in my head. Although this is not the first website I have created, it’s the first one where I’m just being me. No bullshit. I believe in myself and what I talk about so much that it just floods onto the screen.
One by-product of doing what I love is, hopefully with what I talk about, it can help people. When you start to truly believe in yourself, you can open up so many doors. The funny thing is, most people don’t realize the potential that’s inside of them. It’s just small, consistent action that eventually unleashes your potential.
You have to think to yourself – ‘why not me? what can’t I make it?’
5. Acceptance (To A Degree)
Acceptance can be the best step to overcoming your anxiety. I say ‘to a degree’ because I know that you shouldn’t have to accept everything you don’t like. However, for me, accepting that actually, having anxiety is something that’s likely to stay with me my whole life lead me to overcome it.
When you reach this point, you can start to get over it so much quicker than fighting it. When it becomes your norm, you start to learn how to cope and how to ignore it.
Because when you have anxiety, you get stuck in the present, it’s difficult to imagine a life without feeling anxious and stressed. When you can understand that it’s a normal human feeling (however extreme) you can begin your journey to acceptance.
Once I accepted the fact that although I was acting to get better, I would still have an anxious personality, I started this blog, I starting going out and I started to do the things I enjoy.
I started doing these things because I realized that there was never going to be a ‘perfect time’ to start doing the things I enjoy. I understood that because I’m always going to have an anxious personality I could either carry on holding myself back or start saying to myself ‘why not me?’ and ‘why can’t I have the things I want from life?’
In the end, no magic bullet is going to make you feel 100% better so you can remain feeling at a loss, or you can say ‘to hell with it‘ and start doing what you love and feed your mind what it craves to feel healthy.
I hope this helped you in some way. If it did or made you think, please leave a comment below.
Here’s to your success – Sean
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Previously published on Projectenergise.com.
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