I went to CreativeMornings last Friday, and it really raised my anxiety.
Well, it actually raised my thoughts on anxiety.
This was the topic at CreativeMornings, a monthly breakfast lecture series which, if you’ve been, is a glitter infusion in the arm every month; Matt Olin often breaks into song, everyone fabulous in Charlotte is there, and speakers touch on heart-stirring topics.
The topic of anxiety was really juicy because I’ve experienced it myself, and I love when people give a voice to it. The person who was scheduled to speak was actually stuck in NYC because of the snow. Instead, Michelle Guobadia pulled together the presentation in only 48 hours.
She talked about how anxiety shows up in different areas of her life.
How it shows up when she dates.
How it shows up as a black woman.
How it shows up in her work as Associate Dean of Students & Director for Fraternity and Sorority Life when she interacts with students’ parents.
In her talk, she made anxiety normal.
Human experience with anxiety, if we’re honest, is tied to fear. We’ve gone out of our way to create a comfort zone as a response to anxiety so we don’t experience it. It can be good not to experience anxiety, but for those of us who created it as a response, we’re also having pretty limited life experiences.
Because we never learned how to work with it.
We struggle with this feeling, anxiety or otherwise.
We just want it to go away.
We replace anxiety with other behaviors to show it the door, and those alternatives aren’t always healthy, stunting our emotional IQs even more.
Since we’ve never been taught how to move through our emotions as a whole, we remain stuck in a holding pattern.
Michelle hit on this part over and over again: You can’t move through it if you don’t identify the trigger. If you don’t identify it, you can’t release it.
When you’re coaching and up to big things, so much of it is helping clients through anxiety.
How can you start chipping away at your own anxiety?
Start noticing when your anxiety shows up. What are you doing? Who are you with? Are you thirsty? Are you hungry? Did you exercise today? Track that, and then you’ll start to find the triggers. You’ll see oh, I slept like crap. Sometimes you get severe anxiety because basic needs aren’t being met.
Once you’ve got the basics covered, start to find the more challenging ones. This could be a great place for coaching or committing to a strong yoga practice. Or, work through it with therapeutics.
If you’re experiencing anxiety, know this: it’s not hopeless. It’s possible to live anxiety adjacent when we learn how to live a life of alignment and be in a loving relationship with ourselves.
Hope you uncover your triggers, and then you can start to move forward, hand-in-hand with your anxiety.
