The Cost of Anxiety

1. Relationships

Anxiety can negatively affect your relationship with loved ones. Being preoccupied with worrying thoughts can prevent you from being emotionally present with the people who matter most. You may also feel irritable, on edge, and tense due to feeling overwhelmed. In such situations, you may be quick to lash out, only to feel remorseful after this occurs. Such behavior is unfair to loved ones. It is preferable to communicate your feelings and ask for a few minutes to decompress rather than have a volcanic eruption that hurts them.

2. Physical Health

Anxiety can negatively impact your physical health. Those with anxiety have been found to have statistically higher rates of arthritis, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart disease, and hypertension than those without anxiety. Anxiety can also negatively affect your sleep, which can further weaken your physical health.

3. Performance

Anxiety can negatively affect your work performance. Symptoms of anxiety such as poor concentration, distractibility, and fatigue make you vulnerable to mistakes and jeopardize your job security. Anxiety can also make you prone to job burnout, which is characterized by the triad of emotional exhaustion, feeling detached, and lacking personal fulfillment.

4. Habits

In an effort to cope with anxiety, you may engage in unhealthy habits such as alcohol use or stress eating, which can further hurt your physical and mental health.

5. Happiness

You are less likely to be happy with anxiety churning in the background. This makes sense because anxiety is associated with thought patterns such as worst-case scenario thinking, taking things personally, and selective abstraction, in which you zoom in on a negative detail while ignoring everything else about a situation. Not surprisingly, anxiety makes you prone to depression.

Here are three tips:

1. Examine your thoughts

Your mind is a master storyteller. It will treat the worst-case scenario as imminent and inevitable even if it has a low probability of occurrence. Journaling can help you uncover and challenge anxiety-provoking thoughts.

2. Recalibrate your expectations

We often put immense pressure on ourselves to be perfect. Letting go of your perfectionism can lower anxiety.

3. Release the tension

We often hold onto anxiety without noticing it. Take a moment to observe where your body holds your anxiety. This may be your neck, shoulders, calves, or trapezius muscles. Spend a few minutes stretching those muscles and release the tension.

Read the complete article available at Psychology Today!

Reflection:

How has anxiety affected your life? How do you cope with your anxiety?

#Anxiety #Coping #MentalHealth

If you liked this article, you might also like, "Heal Anxiety by Retraining Your Brain"

You might also like, "Tips to manage Anxiety and Stress!"