Recently, I was working with one of my clients, a young girl, around 18 years, who had the fear of speaking to people. She was a brilliant student in college but had no friends as she could not communicate. She had all the answers when the lecturer asked questions during the class but could not muster up the courage to answer them in front of the class. Branded as a dumb girl, she always thought others are making fun of her. This resulted in low confidence and her self-esteem took a fall. An NGO referred her to me and when I was working with her, we realised that she had anxiety about speaking. There were many distortions in her thinking about fear of the response. Sadly, it resulted in damaging her confidence and performance in the class. From being an intelligent girl in the school who scored high marks in her 10th Standard, she developed anxiety and depression during three years. I could see her eyes sparkling when she talked about the school, the same sparkle dwindling when she spoke about her life at the college. Once she was convinced that she needs to work on her anxiety, we both formulated several strategies, and in 6 months, she could overcome it to a greater extent.
There are different situations in life where we as humans get anxious. For others, the issues may seem insignificant or trivial but for the person who is undergoing anxiety, it’s the question of their life or career. All of us would have gone through some anxiety at some point in our life. Some people accept it and work on their anxiety by seeking the support of friends, family, counsellors, sometimes even medical help. Several others may just keep it in their closet and let the cycle repeat again until it affects them significantly.
Take the example of my other client — who is very well known successful social influencer, but was dealing with his father’s Alzheimer’s ailment day in and out. It took a toll on his mental health. Being single with no family support, he was getting anxious day by day about his father. This affected his sleep and work performance. He got timely help by seeking counselling and now leads a fairly balanced life dealing with the situation rationally though not much has with his father’s condition.
There was another client who had a successful career at the office, approached me to counsel for family issues. She was a software engineer at a multinational company. She had a good childhood and schooling. She was confident handling multiple projects at the office but when it came to affairs at home and handling people at home, she would get anxious. As the counselling progressed she could identify her belief systems and areas where she can develop strategies to work towards getting over her anxiety.
How do we define anxiety? Anxiety can be regarded as a natural response to stress. When we are apprehensive about what lies in the future, it triggers anxiety. In simple words, fear of the unknown is nothing but anxiety. It can range from, being anxious about the first day at school, giving an interview for the dream job, giving a public speech, to fighting an election, fighting a war with an enemy, or waiting for test results of a biopsy, etc. No anxiety is small or big. It creates the same biological and physiological sensations in the body. Anxiety can be temporary or more persistent such as phobias (fear of heights, fear of animals, insects, etc), panic disorder, Health worries, general anxiety disorders, post-traumatic disorder, etc.
One other client was a state level cricket player who met with an accident, hurt his knee and was advised bed rest for more than 6 months. Unfortunately, he contracted Covid-19 virus as well which made him lose almost a year in his career. When he started get back to the practice, he was feeling anxious about his performance as well as his selection. Being the aggressive player that he was, it was a huge hit on his confidence losing a year with ailments and losing practice. It took several months for him with constant counselling help to accept the situation and slowly work on his anxiety.
Life experiences contribute to a larger extent to anxiety. A father who loses his son due to illness starts to become anxious expecting another catastrophe hitting the family. Sometimes, how we were brought up also contributes towards building anxiety: for eg: while we were young, our parents would have told us that, ‘If you go in the dark, the demon will capture you”! Even though it was just to stop us from going out and getting hurt, this belief would get built into our system, then we will be anxious about the darkness.
Also, being bullied, sexually harassed may develop anxiety when exposed to the situations In reality or in imagination. A person who met with an accident may develop anxiety to drive again expecting another accident. Any stress — either at work, or in marriage, or on the financial front, managing relationships, deteriorating health, etc. — that challenges the person’s ability — will result anxiety if not tackled rightfully. It’s also observed that anxiety may even be due to genetics or brain chemistry.
The next question that comes to our mind is, ‘is anxiety bad?’. The straightforward answer is ‘NO’! Anxiety is a normal response to danger or automatic ‘fight or flight response’, by the body when it feels threatened. But the question here should be — does the threat demands ‘fight or flight response’? In ancient days, when a man is faced with a threat of being exposed to a lion or tiger, he would either flee as fast as possible or fight with all his might. But, in today’s world, facing lion or tiger is such a rarity! Hence, the same response may not be needed!
I have seen several instances where people have given up their dreams or goals when they got anxious thinking about them. A person would give up on a dream job which is in a far-off location, just because he is afraid of flying on the aero-plane. A passionate budding law student may not pursue the course because of the fear of public speaking.
As we ponder further, is anxiety bad for human beings? Again, the answer is “No”. Let’s think — what if there is no anxiety? This question can be answered with many more questions to be asked to ourselves:
· If you are not anxious about your future, would you prepare well for the exam?
· If you are not anxious about your relationships, would you make the efforts to save them?
· If you are not anxious about losing a fight, would you put more effort into preparing and strengthening yourself?
· If you are not anxious about your health, will you take care of your health habits?
If you look at the above scenarios, we can say that instead of avoiding anxious situations, we can work with anxiety to deal with it and develop strategies to cope up or handle the challenges of fear. Using various strategies, we can reduce the anxiety to a level where we can tolerate it and still be in the situation. When we reach this state, we will be able to get the best out of any situation. Needless to say, the situations still remain the same but you are better equipped enough to handle it.
Some of the common practices which can be applied in life to handle anxiety are:
· Practicing balanced deep breathing and controlling our breath in turn our mind.
· Progressive muscle relaxation
· Practicing mindfulness
· NLP (Neuro-linguistic programming) and CBT(Cognitive behavioral therapy) techniques etc.
Most of the anxieties discussed above may not need any medical attention but will need help from counsellor or mind coach with coping strategies and practices. In other words, to develop life skills to handle anxiety in a better way. It is normal to experience anxiety in life, but it takes awareness and courage for a person to work on it and cope with it.
