3 Reasons to Be Friends With Your Anxiety

Anxiety? Let’s talk about it. There are millions of reasons to HATE anxiety & it’s taken me a million years to get to this conversation, but there are a few reasons you should allow yourself to be friends with those anxious thoughts. Yes, friends.

I develop these conversations about anxiety while working with my therapist. I share them with you because the developments feel monumental to me. Ha! Frankly speaking, I’m excited & geek out over this shit. And if you don’t have a therapist yet, maybe this can help. I remember in the beginning of my journey with anxiety & mental health I would have never imagined wanting to be friends with my anxious thoughts. I was laser-focused on “fixing” them & making them go away. But when I stopped pushing the anxious thoughts away, and decided to stand next to them, I had a sudden feeling of relief. For me, this decision to stand beside my anxiety happened in one single moment, in my car. I remember smiling afterward. (I’ll tell that story another day.)

omg but another quick story. Maybe I already told this one. I went into the therapist like 2 months, maybe less, from my first appointment. After my first MAJOR panic attack. I remember telling her I’m cured & I want to help people. WTF. I had no clue what the hell I was talking about, those conversations now give me the shivers. For me, anxiety comes & goes. It’s good, it’s bad. It’s here, it’s there, it’s far away, it’s close by. But it’s strengthened me, and I have no conversations about being “cured” anymore. To me, that sounds silly. I think everyone can always work on their mental health strength as it’s never “cured” or perfect. (And if it is, what world are you living in? Amirite?)

Reasons To Like Anxiety

3 Reasons To Be Friends With Your Anxiety

You’re Basically A Super Hero

In the evolution of human beings, anxiety has always been there to help us out. To warn us that something was wrong, give us a heads up, give us time to protect ourselves. If that alone doesn’t make you want to be friends with it, I don’t know if anything else will. “‘As a society, we believe in evolutionary components to natural selection for those most capable of adapting in the ever-changing environment… Anxiety plays a key role in this dynamic, as it is the internal indicator that something is amiss and high alert needs to be taken.’ So even if it trips you up, it’s there for a reason.” (via) Meaning, if a natural selection exists, anxiety is here to make sure you’re the one still standing. That’s some extraterrestrial shit. And I wanted to use that information as a tool, why am I trying to get rid of something so powerful?

I started to shift my mind to align WITH anxiety rather than against it. Becoming friends allowed me to almost conversate with it. When I started feeling my anxiety creep up, I would talk to my feelings rationally. “Do I need to be feeling this my BFF anxiety? If I do, what do I need to work on changing in my environment? Or, am I ok BFF anxiety? And you’re just going off some misconceived clues? Cuz if so, we can chill out now.” We chat. Me and anxiety. As if we’re friends working together, not always best friends, but friends nonetheless. The conversations have helped tremendously.

If you have anxiety & you haven’t reached this stage of conversation yet, I encourage you to keep working on it. Because holy smokes you can make yourself SO proud. I have stories I don’t want to share yet, but having anxiety on your side can make you more powerful than you realized you could be. More powerful than the people around you that you thought were so strong. If you ask me, it’s a superpower a lot of people are missing out on so I’m pretty fucking grateful to be working with it. And don’t get this confused with me and anxiety always seeing eye to eye, we still have full blow throw down fights every so often. You know? Friend’s can disagree.

Perspective

I think by now you all know how big I am on perspective. To do your best to hear people that are different than you. NOT to understand, but allow yourself to LISTEN. If you’re not doing that often, I suggest trying harder. Turn on a different TV show, grab a different genre to read, talk to someone new in the office. My journey with anxiety has opened the door wide to the conversation about mental health. I feel incredibly connected to all the stories I hear & the pain so many people are going through every single day. People that are dealing with issues so much worse than my own, or haven’t even started their journey. I did and said a lot of ignorant things before going down this journey with myself. It wasn’t until I started working on my own anxiety that my eyes were truly opened, and it’s hard to close them now. All of a sudden I could no longer be ignorant of other people’s journey. Whether silent & behind closed doors or visible. This was the greatest gift of my journey, being able to slow down & think.

Anxiety also gives you perspective into your own feelings. You know how powerful it is to FEEL? We enjoy getting numb & are bred to conceal our emotions. Whether that’s frustration & swear words, or taking too many days off work due to the sadness of a loss. Trying to cry in front of anyone or hug someone really hard or say simple words like I love you, is not the norm. All our emotions are wrapped up so tight a lot of people don’t have access to them anymore, and don’t know when or how to use them. Anxiety can reopen that door for you. It did for me. I think a lot of the reason my anxiety peaked with a panic attack was because I didn’t know what to do with emotions for most of my life. Being open to feeling them & then practicing how I express them has taken so much patience but I absolutely love it. This is where anxiety has given me the most confidence, through my emotions. I’m so happy to have this emotional side of me out in the open, brave, not quietly hidden or embarrassed. Anxiety helps me feel & that’s a superpower in its own right.

Take Charge of Your Health

When you start talking to your anxiety, you’ve really lost your mind. JK. We’ve all lost our mind already. Once I started paying attention to my “warning signs” I started evaluating my self-talk, my relationships, my food, and my work. I slowly wanted to start improving in any area I could. I would have never started thinking this way without my anxiety to shake things up. I spent so much time working through my thoughts, I wanted to start working through other areas of my life too. Before you knew it, my lifestyle changed. My relationships changed. My confidence changed. My diet changed. What I wanted to put on, in and around my body slowly started to transform for the better, and it happened pretty organically. No diets, cleanses, intense meditation moments. Just one natural step at a time. That includes uncovering & prioritizing what’s important to me, I started noticing a major shift in this area as well.

Reasons To Like Anxiety

So looking back, I can’t say I hate anxiety that much. As much as I have bitched about it or wanted it to fucking disappear, when I sit down & think about all the benefits that I’ve received since working on my mental health – I wouldn’t want to be the person that hasn’t. It takes one conversation with someone that doesn’t have perspective for me to be grateful that I’ve at least opened that door. I don’t believe these benefits are seen only with anxiety, I’m sure they can be applied to general mental health & other symptoms as well, you just have to allow your mind to be open to the perks.

If you deal with anxious feelings or anxiety, but have found a few perks, share them below!

That’s all I have for today, I hope you all have an excellent weekend! We’ll talk soon.

Be thoughtful

3 Reasons to Be Friends With Your Anxiety