It is quite hard to overcome anxiety. Fortunately, there are ways to deal with it.
Let me first tell you what you should and shouldn’t expect from this post. After reading this post, you can expect to be free from anxiety. But you shouldn’t expect to get this result just by following the procedure outlined in this post once. Just like how muscle growth requires regular training that continues for at least several months, overcoming anxiety requires regular mental training that continues for prolonged period of time.
With this in mind, let’s jump to the main topic. Whenever you are anxious, follow the following 3 steps and you’ll feel much better.
1. Find Out the Detailed Reason for Your Anxiety
In order to overcome anxiety, you must first know what’s causing your anxiety. It may be an event, an object, a person et cetera. You don’t have to be too specific. It is good enough to just summarize the reason for your anxiety in a sentence or two.
2. Have a Correct Understanding of What You Are Responsible For
So we now have a pretty good understanding of what is causing our anxiety. Next, we should check if the cause of our anxiety is something that we can really deal with.
For instance, if you are anxious about the possibility of a huge meteor hitting the Earth, you are being anxious about something that you can’t deal with, or aren’t responsible for.
If you have to be anxious about something, be anxious only about the things that you are responsible for. Being anxious about things that you are not responsible for is like putting zero into a denominator. It just can’t be defined! If you are anxious about something that you are not responsible for, just ignore it.
But what does it mean to be responsible for something? Let me give you a clear idea of what responsibility really means.
If you didn’t do anything and something just happened, you are not responsible for what happened.
For instance, if you are walking on a street and a car accident happens in the nearby road, you are not responsible for the car accident. So far so simple.
If you did something that led to an unexpected result, you are not responsible for what happened.
For example, if you turned on your computer and your computer unexpectedly caught on fire, you are not responsible for the fire. Of course, you should try to extinguish the fire afterwards.
Some people may have a question at this point. What about things like involuntary manslaughter?
We can divide the actions that involuntarily harms other people into two categories.
First is the case in which you did something dangerous in the first place and ended up harming someone.
For instance, if you threw a can out of the window at the 20th floor of the building and the can ended up killing someone, the fact that you couldn’t know whether the can would hit someone before throwing it can’t be a good excuse for asserting your innocence. You shouldn’t have thrown a can out of the window at the 20th floor in the first place because the action apparently poses danger to the pedestrians walking on the streets.
However, let’s consider a second scenario in which you dropped a heavy piece of garbage into a large trash can. Unfortunately, a man was sleeping in the trash can and you of course did not know this. If the garbage hit the man in the head and the man dies, are you responsible for his death? In this case, you are not responsible for his death. Legal judgment for your action may vary depending on the judge and the country you are in, but regardless of the legal outcome, you are not responsible for the man’s death because the action of throwing garbage into a trash can is not illegal and you couldn’t know beforehand that a man could possibly be sleeping inside a trash can.
Whenever you are anxious about something, you should always make precise assessment of whether you are really responsible for the cause of your anxiety.
3. Learn to Ignore Unnecessary Thoughts
Not all thoughts are worthy. Some thoughts are illogical and biased to the extent that they do not qualify to be defined as a thought. Of course, I’m not saying that our imaginations are unnecessary. Indeed, imaginations are worthy thoughts that enrich our lives and fuel personal development. What I call unnecessary are thoughts like “I’m gonna fail anyways”. When such thoughts enter your mind, the best possible response you could make is to just ignore it. Do not interact with such thoughts, because it would be a total waste of time. Would you like to argue with someone who claims that 1 + 1 equals 3? Unnecessary thoughts are not unlike such person.
I hope this post can give your mind some inner peace.