Turning Anxiety Into Opportunity

Jessica Wynn unlocks the door to masculine emotion.

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We all have times in our lives where we feel anxious, but then there come the tumultuous periods where our anxiety morphs into crippling self-doubt and fear. Suddenly we’re kids again, lined up in gym class, waiting to be chosen for a team. The hardest thing to do is just stand still and pretend that you don’t care all your friends’ names have been called out, but you have no other choice. So you wait, and the embarrassment grows.

Our most anxious, unhappy moments in life can feel a lot like that. Only, instead of staying put because we have to, we choose to plant our feet firmly where we least want them to be. To protect our hearts, we hide: in a relationship that isn’t right for us, in a job we aren’t passionate about, in a mind that shuts down every good “what if” before it has a chance to blossom.

This defense mechanism only worsens our anxiety, since all the time we spend hiding translates to going nowhere fast, and the timer glares at us every time we look in the mirror.

What if I told you that your anxiety doesn’t have to define your struggles?

There’s no magic cure to alleviating fear and insecurity, but there is a way to use them to your advantage. You can learn to turn anxiety into opportunity and transform your fear of failure and uncertainty into a launch pad for your dreams.

Think about it, the most exhilarating things in life are also some of the most uncertain.

Falling in love. Moving away for the first time. Becoming a parent. Skydiving. When someone jumps out of a plane from 10,000 feet, they aren’t letting the possibility their chute may not deploy distract from the insane beauty of falling through the air. If anything, the fear of what could go wrong – and their complete inability to prevent it – only heightens their joy in the present.

Because that’s all any of us have. Anxiety doesn’t change the fact we could wake up tomorrow and our dreams could all come true. It also doesn’t stop everything from falling apart. In more cases than not, anxiety just stops us from gaining the valuable life experiences we need to become who we so desperately yearn to be.

Anxiety can become an Opportunity

Let’s face it, as great as it would be to just shake our oppressive thoughts loose and be able to plunge headfirst into any and all of life’s challenges that just isn’t an option.

Perhaps you’ve struggled with anxiety for as long as you can remember. Or maybe you’ve only just begun to realize how scary life can be. There’s no promise that our minds will ever cease, because as soon as we overcome one fear, another will rise to take its place. But maybe our anxiety doesn’t just have to mean we are merely afraid, that we are weak, that we are helpless and incapable.

Maybe it can be a sign that what we’re worried about is important. With one choice made each morning (maybe even several times a day), we have the power to transcend our anxiety and turn it into opportunity – a motive to push forward and do exactly what’s scaring us the most, one heart-pounding step at a time.

We can run, trembling and laughing, like adrenaline junkies headfirst into our futures. There will still be nights where our thoughts hang low like storm clouds and fear rumbles deep in our chests, but there will also be mornings, new and constant as ever, with the chance to get out of bed and make something of ourselves, because the only thing that’s scarier than failing is realizing that we deprived ourselves chance to do so.

Previously published by www.theseeds4life.com

Photo by Mesbah Uddin Khan