Four Tricks for Managing Your Anxiety
Learning something new always involves a degree of anxiety. Will I fail? Will I appear foolish? Questions like these can keep young business pros from taking on new challenges that will expand and hone their skills, so one of the keys to maximizing your potential is learning how to manage anxiety. How can you tamp down panic and get on with business? Huffington Post blogger Therese Borchard has suggestions:
- Recognize the reptilian brain. Elvira Aletta gives a brilliant neuro-psychology lesson in one of her posts where she explains the two parts of our brain: the primitive part containing the amygdala--which is responsible for generating and processing our fear and other primal emotions--and our frontal lobes: the neo-cortex or the newest part of our brain, which is sophisticated, educated, and is able to apply a bit of logic to the message of raw fear that our reptilian brain generates. Why is this helpful? When I feel that knot in my stomach... I try to envision a Harvard professor, or some intellectual creature whacking a reptile on the head with the a book, saying something like "Would you just evolve, you overly dramatic creature?"
- Exaggerate your greatest fear. I know this doesn't seem like a good idea, but truly it works.... Tell your fear to someone else and make sure to be as dramatic as possible, with very descriptive words and emotions. Then, when you've told every detail you can think of, start over again. Tell the entire, dramatic story, again with very elaborate descriptions. By the third or fourth time, it becomes a bit silly. [Tim Ferriss recommends something similar in this post on productivity through pessimism.]
- Sweat. I have found only one full-proof immediate solution to anxiety. And that is exercise. Bike. Walk. Swim. Run. I don't care what you do, as long as you get that ticker of yours working hard.
- Watch the movie. In his blog, Psychotherapy and Mindfulness, psychologist Elisha Goldstein explains that we can practice mindfulness and experience some relief from anxiety by procuring some distance from our thoughts, so that we learn to watch them as we would a movie.
(Image of don't panic button by Jim Linwood, CC 2.0)