Not only young people, but all of us will experience anxiety throughout our lives.
Death anxiety, anxiety about having a certain disease, separation anxiety, test anxiety, sexual anxiety, etc., are emotions that follow us throughout our lives and are present in every aspect of our lives.
In the parent-child relationship, we see this anxiety phenomenon very clearly. There is a phenomenon called “your mother thinks you’re cold,” which means you’re not cold, but she thinks you’re underdressed and need to wear more clothes, or you’re too thin and need to wear more clothes. Or you’re too skinny and need to eat more. Then we know that this is a situation where often the mom has some anxiety and can’t really see the needs of this child.
Anxiety is also common in intimate relationships. The boyfriend hasn’t contacted you lately and doesn’t respond to tweets in a timely manner. There is a lot of anxiety about whether or not he doesn’t love me, whether or not I’m not that important. So some people get so caught up in their own thoughts that they don’t even want to deal with work.
I know I have to submit my paper or work report next Monday, but for the past week or so, I can’t do anything, so I have to stay up until Sunday night to do it.
In very anxious situations, I have insomnia, sometimes fall asleep with interrupted dreams, wake up suddenly, and have very shallow sleep. Some will have physical reactions such as diarrhea, nausea, panic attacks, and palpitations. Some may worry about having various diseases and keep going to the hospital for repeated tests. The reason for this is that they are unable to deal with and express some kind of anxiety, which has many effects on their body and sleep.
I. Uncover the fog of anxiety, touch the spiritual space, and connect with the real self.
Anxiety is an emotion, which is the worry and fear of unknown danger.
In ancient times, the worry and fear of danger and the unknown protected people to survive. The ancients often said, “If a man has no distant worries, he will have near worries. We are told the positive effects of anxiety, “Born in worry, die in peace”.
Psychologists have shown that there is an inverted U-shaped curve between anxiety level and task completion, and that low and high anxiety levels are not conducive to task completion. Athletes need to have moderate levels of anxiety before competitions or during exams. Too low anxiety prevents them from mobilizing their emotional state, while too high anxiety prevents them from focusing their full attention on the exam and requires some energy to deal with the anxiety.
When anxiety is present, it can be experienced as being surrounded by anxiety. It is essentially an uneasiness in a diffuse state, vague, diffuse, without a relatively clear object or content.
Fear is a response to a specific danger, and when someone is afraid of a dog, by staying away from the dog, the danger is removed and the person is less afraid. And when you are anxious, you often can’t leave the thing or situation that triggers the anxiety, such as taking a test, writing a paper, or evaluating a job title, you can’t not do it, so the relationship with the thing is gluey, you are afraid of it, but you remain in a if-and-when relationship.
You are afraid of it, but you remain in an imminent relationship with it. You can’t take your eyes off it because it has to be done. For example, if you are very anxious about finishing your thesis, you don’t want to touch it for a while, you don’t want to think about it, but it’s always there, and you can’t play with it without worrying about it.
Even if you do other things, there’s worry lurking inside. So for a period of time, you are in a state of stalemate and stalemate and experience a very strong sense of helplessness.
From this we can see that the difference between anxiety and fear lies in whether or not the object of fear is specific and in whether or not there is a sense of control. If the object of fear is very specific and clear, one can know how to respond and has a sense of control. When it is not clear, there is often a sense of uncertainty, which can lead to a strong sense of loss of control and helplessness. That’s why anxiety is so annoying.
Anxiety is like a layer of fog. When swallowed by it, a person’s cognitive function and judgment are greatly affected, and he or she is unable to make accurate judgments about external reality, dangerous situations, and his or her own abilities. At this time, people can easily experience the emotions of childhood, feeling that they can’t do anything or do anything at all, and that their self-esteem and sense of self-worth are seriously threatened.
For example, if a leader asks you to do a job that you have never handled before, there must be some anxiety. Because it has never been handled before. If this anxiety is very high, you may not be able to sleep, you may feel incompetent, and you may not be able to do anything. But as the anxiety decreases, you may learn, oh, it turns out that doing this job requires interfacing with other departments, what you can handle, what parts of your past work experience you can use.
What are the reference items, whether you need leadership to help you coordinate some resources, who you can call on for help. Then you will slowly gain clarity, know how I am doing, and go step by step to complete the project.
2, anxiety is present from birth, and the early adopter’s digestion and response to the child’s anxiety is very important for the individual to deal with the anxiety, and also helps the individual to form enough inner psychological space and spiritual space to accommodate anxiety.
The Latin root of the word anxiety means narrow, and the German word means lacking, a little tight.
In both interpretations, there is a sense that one does not have much inner mental space. The experience and acquisition of anxiety is associated with the loss of one’s own mental space.
It is associated with the absence and loss of the ability to bear love. Internalized parental ability to process emotions plays an important role in the development of an individual’s capacity for emotional tolerance and thinking skills later in life, and the development of thinking and emotional processing skills further contributes to the development of mental space.
Psychoanalysts view birth as a trauma, the arrival of a small infant from the warm, safe womb of its mother into a cold, boundless world, a dramatic change in environment, from a sense of oneness within the mother’s body to a sudden severance, often with intense death and separation anxiety.
This means that there is a very strong sense of anxiety within the individual from the moment of birth. If the mother can be very gentle with the infant, trying her best to understand and care for the child according to his needs, she can alleviate the intense anxiety to some extent. Let’s imagine that the mother is anxious herself, and keeps shoving food into the baby’s mouth, even though the baby doesn’t want it.
The child must feel bad, its own rhythm is disrupted, and there is a feeling of intrusion and control. If the mother is depressed and doesn’t hold her child when he is anxious, the child will feel neglected and have strong feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness, and no matter what he yells or does, he won’t be heard. For we know that if early adopters are not well equipped to help children digest their emotions and respond to them, those anxieties are not relieved, but rather magnified.
For children, without parental help, it is difficult for them to process their anxieties and their feelings remain unresolved. Later in life, when they encounter situations that bring them great anxiety, it is difficult for them to resolve them because they did not have the experience of being helped and successfully coping with their anxiety early in life.
Imagine a child who is anxious about going to school, and an anxious mother who might say, “You have to go to school. If you don’t go to college, how can you live if you can’t find a job? “
Then we know that this little child is even more anxious because his mother doesn’t know how to solve this problem and it’s causing him so much anxiety that he’s not going to survive. So the child’s inner feeling is, there is nothing I can do about it, and there is nothing his inner mother can do about it, so he gets stuck in his anxiety.
In adulthood, when faced with difficulties and anxiety, he will be like his mother, constantly thinking about all the bad outcomes, worrying that he will lose his job and not survive, even though he made only one small mistake at work. He is trapped in his anxiety and can’t get out of it. The early experience of dealing with anxiety will have an impact on the characteristics of his relationships and problem-solving patterns in the future.
Frustration in itself does not necessarily bring about internal conflict, but rather when it threatens one’s own values, self-esteem and security, and interpersonal relationship patterns, which brings about conflict, conflict brings about anxiety, and anxiety brings about depression and defense.
The pace of society has become faster and faster, and the utilitarian nature of modern society, as a unique part of individual values, has become less important and more instrumentalized, and the term “instrumental man” is now in vogue.
The individual, as a screw in a part of the mass production of machines, is also easily replaced. Anxiety is often a concern for the future and a loss of connection to the present. Life and time are finite, and there is always someone with whom I am not doing enough, a lack of love, money, power, and pleasure, which makes the individual anxious and wanting more. The individual becomes anxious, wanting more. Being held hostage by life and society, one’s own values are lost in it, and what one does is what society thinks is good and what others think is good, so one becomes greedy, and there is more grabbing of nature, others and society.
The problem with this is that it is very difficult to follow the rhythm of one’s life and take certain risks. For example, the anxiety of looking for a job as soon as one enters college,996 the phenomenon of not being married by the age of 30, known as “unmarried age,” and the anxiety of getting married, followed by the anxiety of having children. The anxiety of having a child, and then there are other anxieties. So life seems to be in a state of endless anxiety.
There is an ancient Chinese term called “pulling out the seedlings to encourage the growth”, where parents’ intense anxiety pushes their children to do things that are beyond their age and level of mental development.
For example, some parents have their third-grade student participate in a fourth-grade Olympiad competition. This can cause anxiety and frustration, which can be quite damaging to narcissism and self-worth, and can make it difficult for children to see their own worth properly.
So we know that moderate frustration is good for human development, but when the frustration is too great, beyond what the individual can bear and solve, it will bring self-esteem blow, narcissistic frustration, and in the long run, it will bring the individual’s low sense of self-worth, low self-efficacy, and even habitual helplessness, unable to move when encountering difficulties, and not feeling capable of solving problems.
Freud said that anxiety leads to depression. If we encounter anxiety in our lives, we tend to avoid it or avoid it, and once this behavior pattern is structured, it becomes a psychological symptom. Over time, many people don’t know why they are anxious, they just experience feelings of anxiety.
This is because the anxiety-producing conflict is always suppressed, and anxiety-producing and coping becomes an automatic response. You’ll find that in life, anxious people tend to get anxious as soon as a work task is scheduled and before they even think about it, the anxiety arises. This is the automatic response. You will also find that he reacts this way when he is looking for a job, at work, in an exam, in a relationship, when a situation arises, first he is anxious. Then he avoids it, and finally he will deal with it only as a last resort.
Understand the classification of anxiety, deeper understanding of anxiety
- Freud’s classification of anxiety
(1) Reality anxiety: Anxiety about real, objective threats, disasters, and dangers. Common reactions include panic, avoidance and fear, anger and aggression. It arises from people’s perception of real, objective dangers in the external world, and it can be objectively resolved by taking some necessary measures or actions. For example, seeing a tiger in the park is not the same as seeing a tiger in the woods, and one can take action or measures to eliminate and reduce the reality of the anxiety.
(2) Neurological anxiety: The objective threat is not so great, but the individual subjectively feels threatened by it. In other words, it is not objective vulnerability that prevents the individual from using his or her power, but rather his or her internal psychological patterns and conflicts. These conflicts often arise early in life.
Although repression begins in early parenthood, it persists throughout life in the form of repressed threats. Repression of the fear of threat leads to an inability to identify the source of anxiety. The inability to discern and assess danger contributes to a sense of helplessness, resulting in a diminished sense of personal autonomy, which means that the development of personal power is greatly limited.
(3) Moral anxiety: This anxiety arises from moral, legal, and self-imposed ideals. For example, they demand too much of oneself and demand perfection from oneself. If the ego’s behavior does not meet the superego’s requirements, the superego will punish the ego, resulting in moral anxiety.
- g o. gabbord The following five types of anxiety are classified according to the order of human development.
-Disintegration anxiety: (This is an anxiety in which one feels like one is going crazy or breaking into pieces, often on the verge of schizophrenia or collapse, schizophrenia and some major depressive disorders have similar symptoms) It originates from the loss of a sense of self by integrating with an object or losing the boundaries of the other body, or the disintegration of the self by losing the integrity of the self due to the failure of others in the environment to mirror or idealize it.
-Persecution anxiety: (A feeling that there is a lot of danger in the outside world and that other people are bad and will hurt you. For example, other people may talk about themselves behind their backs, and the feeling that someone is watching them can be intrusive. Schizophrenics have strong persecution anxiety, and some have persecutory delusions, e.g., if someone on the road looks at them, they seem to be plotting a persecutory plan.) Paranoid schizophrenic bits originating from the Kleinian school, in which the primary anxiety is when an externally bad, persecutory object invades the self and destroys it internally.
-Fear of losing the object (separation anxiety): not only the love of losing the object, but also the fear of losing the object itself. It often occurs in the context of a breakup or the death of a family member, moving, changing schools, etc. For example, when a breakup occurs, one feels that no one will ever love one again. Separation anxiety can be seen in children on their first day of kindergarten and can manifest itself in different ways in different children.
-Castration anxiety: Oedipus period, the potential destruction or castration of the genitals from vengeful parental images.
-Superego anxiety: a feeling of guilt or pain of conscience for failing to satisfy an inner moral code of conduct.
Coping constructively with anxiety, transforming anxiety, and living a creative life.
Anxiety is very difficult to live with and accept. Many very anxious people have been enduring tormented emotions and trying to live and fight their own internal anxiety and conflict. Dealing with anxiety carries with it past experiences of dealing with the emotion and automatic ways of reacting. To deal with anxiety, we need to try to deal with it in a constructive way and change our old ways of dealing with the emotion.
Experience, respect, and accept the emotion in the present moment in a non-judgmental and nonjudgmental way, evaluate and understand the message it is sending you, and see what you can do about your emotion.
There is a need to be aware of, understand and evaluate your anxiety, and if it is beyond what you can handle and deal with, then you need to seek help from a professional. We know that there are many times when people feel anxious, but they just have to deal with it on their own. In their experience growing up, parents and nurturers were not able to help their children digest their anxiety, and over time, some of them tolerate it and suffer through it.
Because it’s a good way for someone to find someone else to help you if you’re having some difficulties in your life. Like we mentioned earlier, if anxiety like neuroticism, disintegration anxiety, persecution anxiety, and separation anxiety are very severe, you need to see a psychiatrist, take medication as prescribed, and work with an appropriate counselor to deal with the underlying anxiety issues.
In a relationship, when emotions are intense, avoid dumping emotions directly and try to communicate when you are calm. Take a constructive approach to dealing with anxiety rather than a self-protective one. Open communication can facilitate the resolution of many problematic situations and emotions.
(1) Replace old, habitual, protective reactions with positive ones.
When people feel anxious, they often either avoid it and let it go, or they engage in protective behaviors such as blaming others or attacking them.
Thus, we can see that in families, when parents are very anxious about their children’s learning, instead of trying to deal with their own emotions, they dump their anxiety directly on their children, and some of them will scold and criticize them directly.
I remember reading a news report about a mother, who was having a hard time, taking the subway with her child, and the child lost her money, so the mother got angry and scolded the child in the subway station.
If we think about it, we know that this mother is having a hard time. She must be anxious, wondering if she will survive, and her child gets into trouble again and loses her ticket money. But this mother needs to go and bear the anxiety part herself and see if she can get help from those around her to help them. And her child needs to come home and talk to him when he’s calm. So it requires the mother to be very tolerant of her own emotions in order to help her child absorb them.
(2) Not dumping anxiety directly in the relationship and communicating openly about your anxiety and emotions.
For example, anxiety about a lover neglecting his or her needs and always rejecting him or her can often lead to scolding, criticizing, feeling that the other person is not meeting his or her needs, or even feeling that he or she is useless.
First, when this anxiety arises, it is important to try to internalize and digest your emotions, and then, when they have calmed down, talk with your lover to see what the problem is. Is the anxiety too much for you, and what can both parties do to deal with it? The poet William Blake wrote about anger, “I am angry with my enemies, I hide my anger, but it grows, I am angry with my friends, I speak my anger, but it stops. “.
(3) Respond to your emotions lovingly and emotionally, like a good mother
How would a less anxious mother respond to the anxiety that a mother must feel if her own child is not in school? The mother might say
–“Baby, why don’t you want to go to school? Talk to Mom,”
–I’m having some difficulties, interpersonal or academic.
–Oh, so that’s why you don’t want to go to school, because you’re not happy at school, right? (hugging the little child). )
–Mom will always love you and will face it with you, and we will get through this together. It’s okay. No matter what, mommy is here. Whenever you need mommy or if you need me to do something for you, just come and tell me.
If the mother can respond to the child in this way, then the child will gradually have the courage to face the difficulties without being overwhelmed or avoiding the situation, and when he feels anxious about similar things in the future, he will be able to reassure himself, just like his mother, and look for resources to help him solve the problem.
(4) Mediating anxiety by adjusting thoughts about the emotions that arise
American psychologist Ellis developed the ABC theory of emotions, which states that the same emotion-provoking event can bring about different emotional responses in different people, and that the difference lies in the individual’s thoughts and interpretations of the emotion-provoking event.
Some people have internal misconceptions and misinterpretations that lead to a lot of negative emotions. Some of these negative thoughts have become entrenched and need to be consciously corrected. For example, a person’s anxiety about making a mistake at work that will result in being fired and unemployed, and the thought of not surviving, can lead to anxiety.
But often we know that one mistake doesn’t have that much consequence, so the “catastrophic thought” is wrong in the process, and the individual needs to consciously correct the thought when he or she perceives it to be wrong, and to mediate the anxiety by correcting the thought.
(5) Problem-solving strategies to deal with the current anxiety-producing situation.
Anxiety is often associated with stressful situations, and we often find in life that when we resolve the issues we face, the anxiety is greatly reduced.
It is important to deliberately learn to analyze the problem and gain a sense of control in the process. Difficulties need to be made concrete, detailed and actionable first. Then, step by step, analyze how each small problem can be solved and what resources are available. What are the parts of yourself that you don’t have and what are the areas in which you need to seek help? So to analyze one’s own resources and the resources in the environment that can be used to solve the problem and go through certain steps step by step to solve the difficulty.
It is also necessary to distinguish between controllable and uncontrollable factors in this process, such as taking an exam, luck, and the difficulty of the questions are uncontrollable, but what an individual can control is the level of effort.
When the problem is solved, one needs to recognize the value of one’s efforts and reflect on what lessons can be learned from the problem-solving process.
(6) Live in the present moment and expand the inner mental and spiritual space.
The inner space is small because you care too much about what others say and live in the eyes of others.
Filled with voices inside, always feeling like you could be better, not doing enough, not sure of yourself. This tends to live in the self-pity and judgment of the past, with a lot of worry, helplessness, and even despair about future outcomes: we need to connect with ourselves. If you don’t have a parent who can handle emotions well, there are ways to expand ourselves.
-Learn to be aware of your emotions, to connect with your present feelings, and to experience them without judgement.
When feeling anxiety, learn to distinguish between your own anxiety and identifying with the anxieties and judgments of those around you. Identify your own boundaries, say no to anxiety given by others, and protect your inner psychological space from being violated. For example, if your mother thinks you’re cold, or a leader thinks you need to give more, but it’s not what you want, you can go ahead and choose no.
If you have a less anxious friend or counselor, you can relieve anxiety, understand anxiety, and live with anxiety in counseling and communication.
Be less critical and harsh with yourself, take care of yourself in a more loving way, and forgive mistakes.
(7) Transform anxiety, take moderate risks, and live a creative life
Anxiety can drive people to take risks, to experience new life experiences, and to open up new possibilities in their lives. I have heard of many people in mid-life crisis who suddenly realize that the financial job they have been working at is not what they like, that they can earn a lot of money, but they are unhappy and have difficulty realizing their self-worth, and that some people will take risks and try new things, such as working in a bakery, and live happily.
Neurotic anxiety is the result of our failure to deal with early anxiety experiences. Individuals do not have the experience of dealing with anxiety successfully, and if we can take moderate risks and be brave in our lives, it can open up new possibilities. There is often some anxiety at work that pushes one to grow and opens up some other possibilities. Anxiety also reminds us that sometimes we need to step outside of our comfort zone and safety zone for experimentation, which can lead to different kinds of growth.
Only if we have past experience with anxiety can we face the present and future experiences of anxiety without being swallowed up by it. How do you move forward in an anxious situation? Rather than bypassing the situation or retreating from it. The conscious or unconscious response is far more valuable than avoidance, which means being subjectively prepared to face the inevitable anxiety constructively. Bravery is not the absence of fear, but the ability to move forward even when afraid.
Why we live and how we want to live is a question that always needs to be considered. But I think that, if we let life grow and bloom as it is, and respect our own rhythm, different life journeys have their own value and are all a kind of completion of life.
In the end, I wish you all the blessings of realizing the value of your life, living with anxiety, and transforming it. Respect your inner voice and rhythm, take moderate risks, and live a creative life.
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