By Leaf Staff Writer Naomi Dunford https://xxnaomi.com
For anyone living with anxiety, controlling the things you think about at any given time can be a difficult task. When anxiety strikes, it tends to bring up strong, intense emotions that are like loud voices in your mind that you can’t easily quiet.
Because anxiety can lock you into stressful thoughts about the present or future, simply trying to get those thoughts to stop doesn’t always work.
However, it can be helpful to have something else to think about, so you can have a point of focus that can distract you from the anxious thoughts until they subside. Here are 12 quotes to help you cope with anxiety by focusing on something a little more empowering in the moment.
- “Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.” – Wayne Dyer
It’s easy to worry when things might not turn out the way you want them to or when something unpleasant or uncomfortable might happen in the future. We would all like to have things happen in a way that’s ideal for us and the people we care about.
To help cope with anxiety, it’s helpful to reflect on how normal it is for everyone to experience things turning out badly from time to time.
When you can increase your acceptance of life’s difficulties, your anxiety can become easier to manage.
- “Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.”– William James
Sometimes our worries and anxieties make us hold back in life, because we’re afraid of experiencing disappointment, heartbreak or adversity.
Unfortunately, this holding back can also mean that we don’t live life to the fullest, and we miss out on opportunities that we’ll regret later.
It’s helpful to reflect on the fact that just as many things work out as don’t, and that we can deal with difficulties when they don’t. That can help foster a more confident mindset that allows us to approach life with more resilience, which often leads to more good things happening overall.
- “Feelings come and go like clouds in a windy sky. Conscious breathing is my anchor.” — Thich Nhat Hanh
One of the tricks anxiety often plays on us is it makes us think that we always feel just as anxious as we do right now. But often, we’re experiencing anxiety today about something that didn’t make us worried yesterday.
A useful skill for coping with anxiety is to step back and ask yourself if you’ve ever felt differently about the thing you’re anxious about before. Maybe you have – but many times you’ll realize you haven’t.
In those cases, you can take a deep breath and realize you’re dealing with a temporary feeling, and you can wait for it to pass instead of thinking you have to do something about it.
- “It’s not time to worry yet.” — Harper Lee
One common issue experienced by people with anxiety is worry about something that will happen far into the future – whether it’s weeks, months or years from today.
But it can also be near-term, like getting into the car to drive to the airport and feeling anxious you might not get there on time because of traffic or a road accident.
If you find yourself grappling with a far-off worry, it can be helpful to ask yourself when the “just right” time is to start worrying. If you’ve started your drive to the airport and there’s no traffic yet, it is time to worry yet? Or might it be better to wait until something is a visible problem?
This one question can help soothe worrying before there’s something to truly be concerned about.
- “Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it.” ― Kahlil Gibran
Anxiety can often be triggered by thoughts around something we want to control – the results of a job interview, a first date, or even our ability to finish a project on time.
But because there are so many things that can influence how those things turn out, they aren’t truly every in our control.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting to do our best to influence a situation or maximize our chances of success. But if we try and control the future too much, we’ll experience anxiety around the idea that our plans might not work out.
To help curb that anxiety, we can remind ourselves of the differences between influence and control.
- “Everyone must imagine his own snakes because no one else’s snakes can ever be as awful.” ― Tove Jansson
Another one of the mental tricks anxiety plays on us is that it makes us automatically think that our reactions are appropriate to the situation we’re worrying about.
Our brains want to be “right” about what we’re feeling – so if our feelings are more intense than they should be, it will rationalize it by thinking our situation is somehow worse than a comparable situation experienced by someone else.
A healthy anxiety coping strategy is to picture someone else experiencing the same situation we’re concerned about and asking if they should feel as intensely as we do right now. This can help us get perspective and bring our concerns down to a more manageable level.
- “You don’t have to control your thoughts; you just have to stop letting them control you.”—Dan Millman
When anxiety arrives, it’s common to feel like the thoughts themselves are the primary problem in your life – that if you could just find a way to control those anxious feelings, you could move forward and live your life.
However, anxiety is present even in people without an anxiety disorder. People with impeccable mental health still get worried and anxious about situations they face in life. They just continue to think through what they want to do in the face of that anxiety.
Sometimes they choose to make a decision and roll their dice on the outcome. Sometimes they decide something’s too risky, and they don’t. And sometimes they just decide that even if they’re feeling worried, they’re going to live their life anyway.
Anxiety is one part of our brain’s natural survival system, and it’s not going away. You can’t control the feelings – but you can control the decisions you make, in spite of your anxious feelings.
- “Trust yourself. You’ve survived a lot, and you’ll survive whatever is coming.” – Robert Tew
One of the hallmarks of anxiety is a worry that something may come to pass that will be intolerable, something we’ll be unable to cope with and survive.
Whether it’s losing a job or a loved one, breaking up with someone or not finding good relationship partner for a year, or simply missing your flight at the airport, anxiety makes us feel like the pain or difficulty will be too much to bear.
It’s helpful to reflect on the adversities you’ve survived in the past. By remembering how you’ve handled minor or medium disappointments, you can reinforce how resilient you really are.
And for those who have suffered severe trauma, remembering how you survived those events can help give you perspective on your capabilities for future challenges.
Anxiety is never enjoyable; but it is manageable.
It’s always good to have someone in your support network who can help you put strategies in place for recurring anxiety – whether it be a therapist, a friend or a caring family member.
But you can be part of your own support network, too. By remembering the lessons that each of these quotes teach us, and by practicing the strategies within them, you can become more fluent in the art of living a full and satisfying life – even in the face of anxiety.