This month has been tough. We have all been so sick and till now, can’t seem to drag out of it completely. With big families it’s always a long chain of newly infected ones, and sometimes it even becomes a circle 🤦🏼♀️. Add to that unfinished plans, piles of schoolwork and chores, sleepless nights, hospital visits, well you can imagine how stressful and tiring this whole “big family sickness business” can get. But most debilitating of all during the sickness times for me is, for some reason, anxiety.
I guess I got it from my mom, who would become totally overcome with worry when we used to get sick. She would start to imagine worst case scenarios even when we got a simple flu. It is super counter helpful to get this anxious when you need your mental state to function through already hectic physical load.
So, after a month of constant sickness we realised we will be dealing with some chronic conditions, most probably as a result of the sickness itself, so this could drag for some time more. I knew I had to take control over my anxiety to get through this. Being anxious for another month was simply not an option.
For me normal techniques dealing with anxiety don’t work much. Meditation, yoga, journaling, listening to calm music, simply lead me nowhere. There are two main ways I deal with my anxiety when it hits, I hope it helps someone out there too.
First one I call it “returning to your body” technique. Actually I learned it from one of my very good friends. It’s very simple. We always think. Thinking is maybe the most overdone task in the human universe. Even when we don’t think about something specific, we still think. So in this technique I just get out of my head and feel all the parts of my body. Giving myself permission to exist in my body and not my head. You will notice so many things when you do this. It’s amazing! Our bodies can tell us about life so much, yet we spend all of our day in our heads. Kind of torturing ourselves. For this technique to really work, you have to remind yourself constantly throughout the day: I live in my body.
Another technique that works for me is changing perspective. When we think about a problem, no matter how huge it seems to us, it is nothing when compared to the universe and the time itself. Our whole lives with respect to universal time is just a second. We, as human beings, exist for milliseconds if we look at it from a different angle. If your life is a millisecond, imagine how unimaginably small your problem should be. It doesn’t mean you should not try to solve it, but it does mean that getting anxious over it, is useless. From smallest particle of your body, to biggest galaxy in the universe all swirls according to the finest plan ever. Try to put yourself and your problem somewhere in between that atom and that galaxy. It helps 😃.
Hope you enjoyed reading this post. Would like to read your comments below on how do you manage your anxiety when it hits. Have a great, anxiety-free day, everyone!
