Headache at job interview? Sweat before delivering public speech? Irrational fears and worries hit on big days?

Everyone experiences anxiety in life. Anxiety is your body’s natural response to stress, and it’s a normal emotion we feel from time to time. In fact, we are not that afraid of what’s happening, but just feel vulnerable because of feeling possible threats or negative experiences just flash back.

Today, we will be talking about common anxiety you might have sometimes, calm your mind with mind mapping and, help you to move forward.

Symptoms of Anxiety

Feeling anxious is evident — both physical and emotional, but lasts for a short time — a few minutes to a few days. Once you’ve passed worries or stress, the anxiety goes away.

We have to pay special attention on frequency and severity when anxiety happens. If anxiety lasts for months/years, worsen, affected your life seriously, please seek professional help.

Why We Get Anxiety?

Anxiety is a normal emotion just like happy, surprise, excited. It is your body’s natural response to stress, and the mechanism you use to deal with stress and potential threats.

There are different reasons cause anxiety: work, study, stress, financial concerns, health concerns, social pressure, etc. Anxiety can be viewed as a form of worry, insecurity and overwhelm, and comes when we feel about uncontrollable and unavoidable circumstances.

For mild to moderate stress and anxiety, we can change our mindset for a more positive perspective for achieving your goal, and move forward.

Types of Anxiety

In this post, we will focus on common types of anxiety that most of us have encountered from time to time.

You can control and get through these types of anxiety by fully understanding these emotions in a rational way. But if you are feeling anxiety strong which seems to be hard to overcome, please seek professional help and there's no need to feel ashamed of it.

Manage Your Anxiety

Understanding your feeling, and find out the cause of it helps you to move forward and achieve something better.

We tend to believe that our emotion is directly determined by an event. However, Dr. Albert Ellis, a psychologist and researcher who created the ABC model, brings up another insight of emotion and consequence.

The basic idea behind the ABC model is that “external events (A) do not cause emotions (C), but beliefs (B) and, in particular, irrational beliefs (IB) do” (Sarracino et al., 2017). Another way to think about it is that “our emotions and behaviors (C: Consequences) are not directly determined by life events (A: Activating Events), but rather by the way, these events are cognitively processed and evaluated (B: Beliefs)” (Oltean et al., 2017).

There’s no necessity to change the environment, instead, recognize and change one’s reactions to the environment helps with the consequences.

Mind mapping is helpful to identify and clarify the thoughts in your mind, and also a great place for you to observe the emotions. You can let go of your beliefs, and organize the tangles of thought in your head.

By asking yourself questions, you can recognize rational and irrational emotions, and gradually you will transform the way you feel about the situation, and find out a solution for moving forward. A personal SWOT analysis is also a great option when feeling powerless and vulnerable as well.

There are several things you can do to eliminate anxiety a bit as below:

Hope this post helps :-)
Stay strong and the best is yet to come.

References

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/anxiety/symptoms-causes/syc-20350961#:~:text=A%20big%20event%20or%20a,Other%20mental%20health%20disorders.

https://www.health.harvard.edu/topics/anxiety

https://positivepsychology.com/albert-ellis-abc-model-rebt-cbt/