Life can be filled with anxiety producing situations. Home life and interactions with your family can bring up feelings of stress. Professional situations often bring tension. Even when we try to treat our training as a form of stress relief, we can feel anxiety about hard workouts and races. The fact that various circumstances in our lives introduce stress is normal and even beneficial when the anxiety is kept in check. It is our thoughts about these circumstances that determine the experience we will have. Two people can experience the same situation but end up with entirely different emotional reactions because of the thoughts they each nurture about those circumstances. 

Anxiety intensifies when we resist it. Resistance causes us to feel that something must be wrong, when in reality, anxiety is just a part of life. Nothing has gone wrong. Stress can bring out the best in us when managed properly. 

It is common for us to replay a stressful situation in our minds. Replaying the situation again and again keeps our minds in the stressful state. Our bodies stay in the physiological response as long as we keep the thoughts about the situation in our minds. If we instead allow ourselves to feel the anxiety and process the emotion we can then move on. 

A confrontation with a spouse, coworker or a friend can evoke feelings of anxiety. It is common to replay the scene in our minds, assigning blame or guilt. We can spend time thinking of ways that the other person was in the wrong or beat ourselves up about what we did wrong, finding evidence for either side. If, instead, we look at the situation with curiosity and compassion we are then able to process the emotion associated with it. Then we are then able to move forward, find solutions and heal the relationship. 

Take a look at the times when you feel anxious. 

What thoughts escalate the anxiety? 

What thoughts help you process the feelings? 

How can you reframe the thoughts in order to accept, rather than resist them?

How can you then move past the anxious thoughts to find ones that serve you better? 

 Adding resistance to the anxiety just makes things worse.