That may sound crazy. Do we really need anxiety? Well, we kind of do. We are actually wired to have some level of anxiety. It is a normal part of life. We all worry about things and our worry lives on a spectrum... small snack size worries and big, overwhelming worries. But let's remember that our worry and anxiety helps us every day. It helps us evaluate risks that come our way every day. We may worry about every day activities but it doesn't often keep us from actually doing them. Take a drive in your car - while we know car accidents happen, we often mitigate the risk and take the drive anyway. We wear a seat belt and follow basic precautions and rules of the road and we go for it! What things do we tell ourselves to get in the car? How do we assess the risk and still actually get behind the wheel?
There are may things like this that we are mitigating every day. We actually want to utilize some level of anxiety every day, but we want to be able to still engage in our daily activities. When anxiety starts to keep us from typical activities, we might need help exploring such anxious thoughts. When anxiety symptoms such as racing thoughts and catastrophic thinking start to keep us from being able to evaluate our days or from being able to slow down and make thoughtful decisions, we might need to reach out.
Reaching out can help explore any anxious thoughts and how it affects decisions, relationships, and daily life. Then we can develop better strategies for treating anxious thoughts and get comfortable within our own mind!
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