#1 Step Toward Reducing Anxiety and Increasing Joy

The first step to reducing anxiety and increasing joy is to understand anxiety. Not get rid of it, or ignore it, or change it. But to understand it.

Once understood, anxiety can more easily be managed and reduced. And it is nearly impossible to increase joy in your life if anxiety is in the way. So understanding anxiety is also a first step in increasing joy.

So, what needs to be understood about anxiety?

1) Anxiety is anticipatory.

It is about something that might happen, not that is happening now.

Yet your body responds as if it were already happening.

If you imagine an upsetting or scary event, your body releases the same internal chemicals that would be released if the event were indeed happening: adrenaline, cortisol, etc.

Your flight, fight, freeze mechanism is activated. Your pulse rate increases, your blood pressure goes up, your palms might get cold or sweaty, you might feel nauseous or have butterflies in the stomach, your muscles tighten. Your body is preparing to fight or flee.

Yet there is nothing in the present moment which you need to fight or flee, so your physical reaction has no release.

Which leads to the second thing we need to understand about anxiety:

2) Anxiety has physical and mental components that exacerbate each other.

The anxious body feelings described above, which result from thinking anxious thoughts, actually increase the anxious thoughts, which start spinning even faster. The increased thoughts in turn increase the physiological reaction, and the cycle continues and gets worse and worse.

For some people, anxious feelings start the cycle. The body first feels anxious and on edge and the mind tries to figure out why, so it comes up with things to worry about. Then those worrisome thoughts increase the physiological anxiety, and the same cycle ensues.

So, I can hear you thinking, "How does understanding this help me to reduce anxiety?"

Once you understand this cycle and become aware of how the cycle works for you, you can figure out the easiest area for you to target to stop the escalation.

I'll tackle the issue of exactly how to do that in my next blog post. In the meantime, I encourage you to approach your anxiety with more curiosity. How is this cycle working in your mind and body? Where does the anxiety start? How does it physically feel? What are your go-to topics of worry, or the main situations that cause you worry?

All of these items hold the key to taming your anxiety. It may seem curious that I am initially asking you to think more about your anxiety, but, truly, the investigation can lead to more peace in your life.