What Causes Anxiety? The First Thing to Know to Start Confronting Our Anxiety
Anxiety is an unpleasant sensation, which of course nobody likes to feel.
Anxiety is a feeling of fear, restlessness and unease about a situation that is approaching and at the same time we are unclear about what this situation is or what the exact reason for our state of malaise is.
Unlike in fear, where we know exactly what is that we fear and what its causes are.
For example, being assaulted in that situation we can experience the specific fear that we are being assaulted.
In contrast, in anxiety, we are not very clear what accounts for this, we feel anxious to greet a certain person but we are not clear on why we have this feeling when greeting the person, or we can have anxiety about leaving home and not know where that feeling is coming from.
Therefore, the anxiety may be helpful to know ourselves; the symptoms can help uncover some aspects of us that are being censored in our minds.
To put it in another way, imagine that we ourselves are a house, and in this house there are many rooms.
So long as we can access these rooms, we will have more space to move inside our house.
And so we can do more activities inside.
But with many rooms closed or censored, we will have less room to move inside our house and we will live with limitations.
When something causes us anxiety, what happens is that some external situation activates something that is in a room that we have closed and locked and this something inside the room begins to try to get out slamming the door.
We do not want this to come to light, we do not want it to leave the room that we had closed, censored and locked.
And at that moment is when anxiety comes these triggers to our mind are precisely what causes anxiety.
To follow the example of the anxiety caused when we greet someone, we will assume that this person is the one who causes anxiety, we can remember a very close relative who we hold a grudge against, but so long as we do not want to acknowledge this anger, we send it to the unconscious, where we are not aware of it.
Thus, this anger is in a closed room and we do not realize this.
In greeting the person who reminds us of our relative, the anger begins to want to leave the room and starts to push and push to the exit and this is the point where the anxiety comes and approaches.
In the example just mentioned, we talk about a feeling of anger being blocked and censored by us as the cause of our anxiety.
But what causes anxiety can be different from anger, it can also be a desire, an impulse or some other emotion.
Now that we have a clearer idea about what happens inside us when it comes to anxiety, we can try to track the moments when anxiety is triggered and this will help us discover what causes anxiety in our own case.
On one hand this will help us end the anxiety, and on the other hand it may help open up more space within ourselves so we can move freely.
With this approach we can approach safely to those rooms that we had closed and locked, and then begin to open gradually to what causes anxiety in us.
Once we start seeing this and begin to confront it, recognize, and assimilate, everything that before was anxiety-provoking to us go diluting, until it disappears and get back that room in our mind to our own benefit.
Anxiety is a feeling of fear, restlessness and unease about a situation that is approaching and at the same time we are unclear about what this situation is or what the exact reason for our state of malaise is.
Unlike in fear, where we know exactly what is that we fear and what its causes are.
For example, being assaulted in that situation we can experience the specific fear that we are being assaulted.
In contrast, in anxiety, we are not very clear what accounts for this, we feel anxious to greet a certain person but we are not clear on why we have this feeling when greeting the person, or we can have anxiety about leaving home and not know where that feeling is coming from.
Therefore, the anxiety may be helpful to know ourselves; the symptoms can help uncover some aspects of us that are being censored in our minds.
To put it in another way, imagine that we ourselves are a house, and in this house there are many rooms.
So long as we can access these rooms, we will have more space to move inside our house.
And so we can do more activities inside.
But with many rooms closed or censored, we will have less room to move inside our house and we will live with limitations.
When something causes us anxiety, what happens is that some external situation activates something that is in a room that we have closed and locked and this something inside the room begins to try to get out slamming the door.
We do not want this to come to light, we do not want it to leave the room that we had closed, censored and locked.
And at that moment is when anxiety comes these triggers to our mind are precisely what causes anxiety.
To follow the example of the anxiety caused when we greet someone, we will assume that this person is the one who causes anxiety, we can remember a very close relative who we hold a grudge against, but so long as we do not want to acknowledge this anger, we send it to the unconscious, where we are not aware of it.
Thus, this anger is in a closed room and we do not realize this.
In greeting the person who reminds us of our relative, the anger begins to want to leave the room and starts to push and push to the exit and this is the point where the anxiety comes and approaches.
In the example just mentioned, we talk about a feeling of anger being blocked and censored by us as the cause of our anxiety.
But what causes anxiety can be different from anger, it can also be a desire, an impulse or some other emotion.
Now that we have a clearer idea about what happens inside us when it comes to anxiety, we can try to track the moments when anxiety is triggered and this will help us discover what causes anxiety in our own case.
On one hand this will help us end the anxiety, and on the other hand it may help open up more space within ourselves so we can move freely.
With this approach we can approach safely to those rooms that we had closed and locked, and then begin to open gradually to what causes anxiety in us.
Once we start seeing this and begin to confront it, recognize, and assimilate, everything that before was anxiety-provoking to us go diluting, until it disappears and get back that room in our mind to our own benefit.
