Brie Thompson is a Journalism Senior and opinion columnist for Mustang News. The opinions expressed in this article do not necessarily reflect those of Mustang Media Group.
Are you ever in a place where everything is going well, life is smooth-sailing, and you’ve been feeling under control. But then one day you wake up, and you can hardly catch your breath?
This feeling might be familiar to the anxious fellas. For others, it’s a rare but overwhelming sensation that is often pushed away and can later on resurface as burnout or exhaustion.
I’m here to tell you that this feeling shouldn’t be ignored. Instead, it can be used as a tool to benefit you.
Anxiety is something that we often ignore and dismiss in society as being “overly stressed” or “too busy.” In reality, it’s a response to feeling a lack of control or an endless cycle of worry.
Anxiety doesn’t always show up in panic attacks, it can show up in so many different forms that we don’t recognize. Beneath the surface, there lies a web of emotions such as stress, fear, and insecurity, that, when we acknowledge, can provide valuable insight into what’s going on in our lives.
For those who feel like anxiety has suddenly crept up on them or consumes them daily, I want to provide you with a sense of hope. By understanding its roots and learning to work with it, you can start to navigate the tricky path of anxious thoughts.
The first thing to recognize about anxious thoughts is recognizing patterns. Make yourself a cup of tea, grab yourself a journal, and search the anxiety iceberg. This is a super helpful tool to be able to pinpoint what you are feeling.
At the top of the iceberg, you can see that anxiety shows up in ways such as anger, irritability, lack of focus, or avoidance. These are the emotions that are easy to see in others, but harder within ourselves. It’s easy to dismiss these emotions as what they are, but looking deeper into yourself you can notice that your anxiety can feel less consuming if you acknowledge what you don’t immediately see.
Beneath the iceberg, there can be many emotions that are much harder to uncover. Some of those are confusion, detachment, pain, insecurity, shame, or overwhelment. These are emotions that within our society have become difficult to talk about, which often makes people close the door when talking about any of those emotions. I find journaling is a great way to discover what’s really below the surface of what you’re feeling.
My main point for this article is not for you to confront all of your suppressed emotions at once. Instead, take a good look at them, figure out which ones apply to the way you’ve been feeling, and write about them. Writing your thoughts out on paper creates a platform for expression and makes your mind a happy one to come home to. Leaving these emotions on a piece of paper are sure a lot better than carrying them in your head.
Anxiety is not your worst enemy, but it also shouldn’t consume you. I think everyone in this world would benefit from looking further into the gut feelings they get and unpacking them. Life can become so much more manageable once you’re able to pinpoint those anxious jitters under the iceberg.