Anxiety can take many forms in a person’s life and at times it can feel like an effective way to cope with life’s stressors. Often anxiety can be a necessary response to processing stressful environments, challenging situations, or areas of great uncertainty. There may even have been times in your life that your anxiety helped you be prepared both mentally and physically to face a challenge. Previously your anxiety might have kept your organized, motivated you to complete tasks, or prepared you for unpredictable future events in your life, family, and career. Over time your body might have become trained to respond to unpredictable situations with anxious feelings in order to signal that you are ready to face challenges head on.
Over time your anxiety developed into an adaptive response. A response that was protective, learned, and useful during major shifts, scary life moments, and times where you might have felt out of control. Progressively your body learned to respond to moments of fear, uncertainty, and adversity with anxiety in order to protect itself from the perceived threat. Your anxiety might have even been effective in protecting you, making you feel at ease, or allowing you to move past challenging times. The hardest part of anxiety being your go to defense mechanism is that it can be hard to recognize when it is not longer benefitting you, and maybe has begun to hinder your growth. So how do you know when your anxiety has crossed the line from being productive to harmful?
When Worrying Becomes Excessive
There may be times when you cannot get an anxious thought, worry, or concern out of your mind. No matter how much you try to push it to the side your concern keeps entering your mind, preventing you from focusing on any other task. There may be times when your anxious thoughts do not allow you to take an active role in your life because they have taken over. No matter how logical you try to be the worries you have do not seem to go away. These worries have the ability to impact your sleep, eating, relationships and even increase susceptibility to panic attacks.
Avoiding Things That Increase Anxiety
Whether it is social situations, work concerns, family issues, or health concerns your anxiety might cause you to withdraw and avoid areas of your life that increase your anxiety symptoms. Avoidance of these situations is a normal emotional and physical response to the perceived threat, but it is not always a productive solution to your anxiety. Often removing or distancing yourself from these areas of your life can increase loneliness, isolation, and belief in your ability to be effective in these areas of your life. When you remove yourself from those triggering situations, anxiety can gain a stronger foothold in your life. Withdrawing from areas of your life can increase your risk of additional mental health concerns and symptoms including depression and suicidal ideation.
When Anxiety Impacts Physical Health
Anxiety can have a strong impact on your body. It can impact your sleep, eating, blood pressure, mood, and energy level. Anxiety as a response to ongoing stress, worry, and fear can exhaust your body and weaken your immune system. By responding to constant stress and never returning to a baseline level your anxiety can exhaust the capabilities of your immune system, leaving it vulnerable. Your anxiety can create a damaging cycle that impacts your physical health which then can increase your anxiety symptoms even more.
The signs your anxiety is doing more harm than good can go beyond the concerns listed above. You could feel that your anxiety is no longer an effective strategy for you to deal with life’s stressors, challenges, or worries. Often our increased anxiety is a learned response to stress experienced in childhood, or later life traumas. The anxiety you feel held a productive and useful role in your life for a long time, while you recovered and moved away from those fears you experienced. Yet, your anxiety no longer makes you feel a sense of preparedness, productivity, or safety. Now your anxiety might feel inadequate, misplaced, or even a burden.
Counseling for anxiety can be an essential resource when you are trying to understand and adapt to life’s challenges. Together we can understand your anxiety, manage its symptoms, and employ more tools that can be effective resources for you. You can heal from your anxiety. It not longer needs to play such a large role in your life or be your first resource during difficult times. Call or email today for a free 15 minute consultation to see how anxiety counseling can be a resource for you.