I’m going to let you in on a little secret that could really change the way you cope & experience your anxiety.

If you suffer from chronic anxiety, I don’t need to tell you how much suffering it brings to your life. It truly can remove the light from your life and make you feel utterly hopeless with its fear based “worried” voice.

One thing that anxiety can do is push us toward a very busy, fast, worried and panicked state. It speeds up our nervous system and brings us completely out of the present moment. When we’re caught up in our anxious thoughts, we tend to seek relief through distraction. We distract ourselves in order to keep the busyness going so we can ignore and avoid the discomforting thoughts that our anxious mind creates.

We run away from the worrisome thoughts by going really fast externally. This will manifest as over scheduling, chronic planning, too much drinking, eating, Netflix, work, exercising, chocolate, couch lounging, etc. Watch for your “go-to” coping mechanism of “over doing” and there reveals your avoidance mechanism.

Take in this statement and see if you can connect with it:

Although anxiety tells you that you “should” do more to fix or figure out a given situation or future predicament, the truth is that you need to do the opposite. What we so often need to do is to stop. Get more still. Be with the anxiety so we can work through it vs. run from it with more doing.

Anxiety will get more fuel with more material to fixate on. More doing is more fuel. More thinking is more material to ruminate on. Questions such as: What should i do? How do I figure this out? Fuel the anxious mind.

Fear will come up within our anxiety with thoughts like: “If i don’t do anything nothing will happen.” Or, better yet, “Things will happen that I don’t want, so I have to do more to control this situation.” These are lies that our anxiety leads us to believe is true.

Have you ever witnessed anyone who let go of control over a situation or outcome? I mean really surrendered to their circumstance, however unfavorable, and decided that they have done all that they could do and truly let go?

Something pretty incredible happens for the person who authentically practices surrender. I don’t mean “false surrender,” which looks like, “Well, I let it go for a day and it didn’t work.” That’s not full surrender.

I’m talking, straight up surrender, which is patient and has no expectations. It looks more like this:

“I let this situation go. I surrender the timeline, the expectation of it ever happening and, with that, I trust that there’s a bigger dream, a bigger experience, person, place or thing that I believe will eventually come in.”

This is an example of deep surrender.

Thats what I’m offering you in this post. I’m offering you the gift of eliminating the merry go round of doing so much, but not really getting anywhere. Exhausting yourself but continuing to feel behind and not good enough.

I’m pointing you toward letting go & finding more peace and quiet. I’m suggesting for you to change the narrative of believing that you have to do more. I’m pointing you toward believing that your work in overcoming your anxiety is to find more stillness.

*Finding stillness is “your work.” I’m not suggesting “do nothing and everything will fall into place.” The work is in allowing anxious thoughts to come up and be there, so they can be processed and loose their charge over you.

Q: How do I get more still? How do I quiet my mind? It’s going 1000 miles per hour and I can’t make it stop.

I hear you and stick with me on this, no matter how resistant you might be to the following words:

It’s an inward job to beat anxiety and become more still and present in your life. Nothing externally is going to get to the route of quieting your anxious mind until you build a consistent self practices to quiet it.

practices to quiet can/may include:

meditation

breath work

check in with the quality and substance of your personal relationships

regular exercise

being in nature

healthy eating

healthy amount of sleep

make plans and schedule based on your desired lifestyle balance

reprioritize your time & energy

limiting/eliminating alcohol/ caffeine

introspective journaling questions to help increase awareness around your anxiety

what are your main priorities?

who & what adds value to your life and fills you up? (activities, hobbies, past times)

What takes from you and leaves you feeling drained?

When do you notice that your anxiety is the loudest? (What situations, people or places trigger more anxiety for you)

Anxiety is an emotion that can be managed. You can live a life with less anxiety as you weed through and eliminate things that keep it alive. There’s a life beyond constant mind chatter and distracting inner background noise. There’s a future that’s more peaceful. As you begin to believe this to be true, you will naturally start going toward the actions and ways of living that cultivate a more peaceful inner world. Over time with your effort, your inner world will align with your outer and you will, ultimately, feel more peaceful collectively. Trust.

Peace & love. Kim

*Above image was shot by Photographer, Ashley Williams @villapalomajoshuatree.

Blog | Licensed Therapist | Self Discovery | North County San Diego, CA