I read with interest Patrick Lange in his winning post-race interview, talking about his panic attack pre-race in Kona.
Case in point, anxiety doesn’t own you. Anxiety is not something you get rid of in order to live. If you put your life on hold to wait for anxiety to leave, you are biding your time in a vacuum that exacerbates anxiety.
Live with it rather than put your life on ice waiting for the day it’s gone to do what you want. Do what you want now!
Trying so desperately to get rid of it simply prints the idea you are not OK as you are. If you have goals and anxiety is making its presence felt:
Do it anyway…
Live anyway!
Don’t educate anxiety that it can take your life from you or that is exactly what it will do.
It eats its meals on your resistance. Don't feed your fears…
Don't enable it, or it will freeze you to the spot. Look, I know it’s uncomfortable, I know it sucks, but you teach it how to treat you. Don’t be an enabler.
So you have to do it anyway in the presence of that uncomfortable feeling, and the more you can, the more you do, the more you do, the more you will. You have to resource yourself.
No one else can do it for you. As you bring acceptance to what is, you begin to slowly weaken it. The yes that you bring to living starts stealing the oxygen from anxiety.
Lots of well-meaning people try to inform those with anxiety about strategies to get rid of it because they themselves are uncomfortable in the presence of it.
Unless you have anxiety, trust me, you don’t know it. You can’t know about anxiety, you have to experience it so you can understand it. Unless you allow yourself to experience it, you’ll always be running away from it and fueling it.
The more you stand in the fire with it, the weaker the energy gets. You are not enabling it anymore….
It starts treating you better, you begin to have a dialogue with it.
No longer a victim, you begin to rise in the shadow of what you thought was your ultimate downfall.
It draws back like a wave on the beach. If it came in, it will go out.
Wait, watch, feel, be patient and don’t run.
Stay right where you are.
Gilesy
