The Problem with Anxiety June 15, 2009
Posted by Geoffrey Wilson in : Health Tips , add a commentThe itching was driving her crazy. Nothing seemed to be capable of providing relief. She’s tried everything. The skin at the web margin on her right hand between the 4th and 5th fingers was as irritated as her disposition. If she had been able to find the right words to describe how she felt, she would have said that her hand was burning as if on fire and that emotionally, she was on tenterhooks – fragile, combustible, close to the edge.
Yes, she was anxious! Horribly so. Her 3 year old son ruled the roost and when the pressures of daily living began to mount, she often found it difficult to cope. Rather than take the hard line she caved in to her son’s incessant demands. He smelled a rat as kids have the knack of doing, and played her for the fool. She didn’t let him down. It was easier to comply with a sigh than to subject herself to the ceaseless whingeing – and the temper tantrums. The boy’s father with whom she no longer had relations, was even more generous in his supply of sentimental comfort to the boy and eventually the youngster began to realize that he could do as he pleased when he pleased.
But like all things, if you can find a leak in one place you will be able to find leaks elsewhere. If the home is unstable, work will suffer too. Fatigue and depression had reduced the mother’s effectiveness in the home to survival rather than transformation and this became the new benchmark of successful living – an attitude that spilled over into every other aspect of her life from shopping to recreation and rejuvenation. If your focus is on survival you will only be interested in getting by. If your focus is on transformation, you will be moved to do things differently.
And there is a difference between working for a living and living to work (in an inspirational sense) as the disgruntled know only too well. When you work for a living, you become a slave to the work. When you live to work, you set up a vastly different dynamic. Living to work is the same thing as finding your passion, connecting with your purpose, embracing the moment, creating and designing. This approach is inspirational and if executed in a balanced manner, great benefit can be derived.
Later, after stumbling upon something she’d not expected to find, our young woman discovered the truth about anxiety. She began to realize that anxiety is a life-style. It is learned behavior. It is a way of dealing with pressure. And it doesn’t work. It doesn’t work because anxious people can’t relax. And if you can’t relax, decisions are made based on speculation rather than understanding. The urge to speculate is the rush to achieve a desired outcome. It is the fear of not having enough. It stifles creativity. It stamps out the possibility of trust. You can see it in someone’s handwriting, in the movements of the body. You can hear it in the timbre of the voice. But most of all, you can feel the energy of anxiety when it hovers nearby.
The cure for anxiety is to stop. Only when you stop can you see what is directly in front of you. And when you stop, you can feel how tense you are. Let the tension go and release opens the door to transformation. Walk through this door and there is no longer a push for anything to happen outside of what happens. This is what the ancient Chinese meant when the principle of non- interference was first discussed.
