The Feedback from Anxiety Helps You Lessen Anxiety

It's hard to listen to any feedback from anxiety when I think my blood is full of laughing gas and I'm hysterically gasping for air. It's one of 'those' days. All systems go, I'm at the bottom of a wishing well, throwing coins towards the light. Sometimes it's impossible to prevent these days when living with anxiety, but sometimes, by listening to the feedback anxiety can give you, you can avoid them.

The Traffic Light System Helps You Listen to Feedback from Anxiety

Listen to the feedback anxiety is giving you. It's there for a reason. Maybe it seems totally irrational at first but nevertheless, it's trying to tell you something:

• Slow down?
• Take a break?
• Look at something differently?

Sometimes I find I'm nervous because there are things I'm not able to deal with, yet. Isn't that funny - anxiety might be protecting you until you're ready to face a difficult challenge!

Use the traffic light system to judge how anxious you are. Firmly connecting anxiety with the present gives it a place and a purpose; It's no longer just this amorphous mass of fear that's too big to possibly face, let alone decipher.

Green: maybe work on a fear or two, strategise, be more efficient in therapy and go ahead and do all those things you've been anticipating and avoiding.

Yellow: Be a bit careful. Watch for the signs of anxiety, and practice anxiety coping skills. Things are borderline: If you're on your game you can keep your balance but if it's a stressful, or you tend to forget/minimize things, like I do, then things can get out of hand.

Red: You jerk out of bed, worried you've missed something. Shopping seems impossible because you're sure you'll have a panic attack and even if you don't it still wouldn't feel safe or OK. You're hyperaware. Every alarm bell's ringing simultaneously: It's overwhelming, exhausting and scary. So get to know and tolerate your limits instead.

Anxiety Isn't One Thing

The more you look at what your anxiety is doing across the course of the day, the more you'll know about what triggers it, why it's there and how complicated it is. It's sign-posted by your mind and body as fatigue, heart palpitations, shakiness, lack of appetite, irritability, a desire for isolation, panic etc.

Keeping track of anxiety helps you live your life. The more you experience it as something that fits on your mental map, the better equipped you'll be to change it. Maybe even draw a whole new map!