Sometimes anxiety is just your brain being an overly enthusiastic and overprotective friend…but it’s still a friend!
Imagine your brain as the puppy that barks at shadows…
It truly believes there is something unusual or scary and all it wants to do is warn you, his best buddy, that there’s something that might be dangerous.
Now you can yell at it, but it’s already scared and that’s not really going to help, just like when we call ourselves “stupid” or “idiotic” when we feel anxious.
You can also try to take the puppy away from the shadow, distract it or take the shadow away, but that just means he will keep barking at every shadow. This is just like when we try to simply avoid anything that makes us feel anxious, it still means that the next time it comes up we haven’t learnt anything.
OR we can sit with the puppy, talk to it soothingly, help it to explore the shadow and learn that maybe it isn’t as scary as it thought it was. That it’s not dangerous and we don’t need to freak out about it. Gently allowing ourselves to explore a fear, learn about it and overcome it means we build resilience toward anxiety, rather than a fear of anxiety itself.
