The Journey to an Anxiety-Free Life

Posted by Jenkins on January 27, 2019January 27, 2019

Part One

I used to think I was self-aware. I used to think I had a pretty good grasp on who I was until I set out on a journey to manage my emotional and mental health and quickly discovered that not only was I not self-aware, I didn’t completely understand what self-awareness meant.

A lifetime of anxiety had led me to live my life inside my head.

Overthinking had become a huge part of who I was, and because I thought an awful lot, I believed I knew myself pretty well.
But I was wrong.

Living in my head meant that I had ignored what was happening in my body.

The gnawing sensation in the pit of my stomach was something I’d learned to live with. I turned my back on it, pushing it deep down inside, hoping if I ignored it for long enough it would simply evaporate. It forced me to retreat further inside myself, to a place I felt safe.

What I didn’t know at the time was that I was retreating to a place that was the main cause of my discomfort.

My mind was my sanctuary, yet it was the most dangerous place I could be.

I didn’t have a clue that everything I was feeling—all the emotions I was trying to run from—was due to what I was thinking.

I was too busy living life in my head to pay attention.

Too busy overthinking every aspect of daily life to notice what was happening in my body. The gnawing sensation in the pit of my stomach, the rapid heartbeat, racing pulse, headaches, sleepless nights, and migraines was the price I paid for my ignorance.

The people around me were oblivious and why wouldn’t they?
Everyone else seemed to carry on with their lives quite happily, and I lived among them — while trying to ignore the neverending ache that seemed to have inhabited my body.

When I decided to face my chronic anxiety, I knew I had to dissect all the little parts of it. I needed to explore it to understand it fully. This is where self-awareness played a vital role.

Sitting in full blown anxiety led me down a path of self-discovery.

I saw myself for the very first time. I had ripped off my mask and stripped off the armour I had wrapped around myself and allowed myself to feel.

I sat in the uncomfortable state of anxiety and felt how my body reacted to the onslaught of thoughts that swam around my head.

Anxiety had been a part of me for so long, and as a result, my emotional health had suffered. I had forgotten there were many other emotions I could be feeling. My emotional vocabulary had diminished over time, and I could barely remember what many of them felt or looked like.

I knew how to feel joy, excitement, and happiness and when they appeared I held on to them with desperation but as soon as I felt the discomfort of negative emotion, it escalated into the familiar state of anxiety.

I had trained myself to bypass all other negative and uncomfortable emotions by heading to anxiety as quickly as possible. It was as if I had long ago decided that if I was going to land in anxiety, I may as well get there as fast as possible and cut out the middle man.

I was a worrier and had been since childhood.

I had allowed my worry to progress into anxiety and falsely believed that it was a normal transformation. I beleive it was because I didn’t know any better.

Dealing with the thought that created my worry meant that it didn’t escalate into something that overpowered me and rendered me useless.

Believing that emotions were merely vibrations meant that I didn’t need to be afraid of feeling them and I started to see them as signals my body sent out to alert me. They told me to pay attention to what was going on in my head.

It was like someone was ringing the doorbell and if I didn’t answer it, it kept ringing and ringing. I could pretend I wasn’t home — hiding behind the couch like my mother made us do when we were kids when she didn’t want to answer the door.

Waiting it out, it finally stopped ringing. But I knew better. Deep down inside — I knew it would be back because that’s what repressed emotions do — they don’t like being ignored and will keep coming back until we acknowledge them.

Self-awareness takes practice.

It takes practice to pause and feel emotions in the body because I was used to processing everything in my head. Now I know my limitations, I know I can’t live in my head any longer than necessary.

My body had yearned for my attention and I was now ready to listen.

Over time I learned to pay attention to the sensations in my body and made the startling discovery that anxiety wasn’t the first thing that showed up for me. As soon as I felt the gnawing sensation in the pit of my stomach, I paused and examined the thought that was causing it.

It was usually a worrying thought, and instead of letting it progress to anxiety, I was able to stay in the emotion of worry. Practicing this allowed me to stay in the first emotion I felt, and I was able to label the emotion with a whole array of descriptive words.

My body always sent me a signal to allow me time to explore the emotion, and I began to feel frustration, overwhelm, worry, fear well before they exploded into an anxiety attack.

In the past, everything seemed to end in anxiety but learning to slow down and not run from emotion had enabled me to process the emotion I was feeling.

This was self-awareness.

Being self-aware means that I’m in tune with my body’s vibrations. As soon as I feel the heaviness in the pit of my stomach, I pause because I know it’s a signal. I pay attention to it and label the emotion I am feeling.

My emotional vocabulary has grown significantly since the day I first sat with my anxiety. I’ve been able to stop the progression into anxiety by addressing the first emotion that shows up.

I look at my past anxiety as my umbrella emotion.

It was the emotion that covered up all the other emotions that came before it. I had never fully felt worry, frustration, or fear because anxiety had jumped in and taken centre stage.

Becoming self-aware played a vital role in what was to become the biggest and most significant change in my mental and emotional health.

Self-awareness was the beginning of my journey to be anxiety free.

Thanks for reading!