For anyone who’s been living with anxiety disorder for some time, agitation has likely become a close companion. You know how it goes- sometimes you’ll just feel agitated because something may go wrong, sometimes you just feel agitated for no apparent reason. For chronic anxiety sufferers, being agitated may sometimes feel like the standard state of mind. For others, increased agitation may indicate the coming of a panic attack. Regardless of how you experience anxiety and agitation, this article will help you deal with both conditions at once.
To begin with, you should be mindful of how not to deal with anxiety or agitation: not by anger, not by being confrontationist. If you get angry with yourself because you have anxiety issues, that will add to your agitation- and make it worse. What you have to try to do is learn how to become an observer, rather than a participant in your own personal drama. Additionally, you have to learn how to read your own mental states, and use certain coping strategies when you feel that anxiousness is kicking in.
You can learn about many such strategies in this website; but in order to succeed using those tools, you first have to learn how to avoid feeding anxiety in the first place. You identify the things, people and events in your life that make you feel restless, and find ways to deal with them. We all have hundreds of stressors indirectly affecting our emotional states; dealing with these sources of stress is much simpler than trying to just eradicate anxiousness.
You should think of your anxiety and agitation as the confluence of dozens or hundreds of factors working on emotional, behavioral, nutritional and social levels of your being. Trying to confront the anxiousness itself can be a lost cause, but if you confront its causes and gradually stop them, that will undermine your anxiety- and your ceaseless states of agitation and discomfort will tend to subside.
The single great mistake people make when looking for ways to overcome anxiety is confronting it directly. While you shouldn’t run away from your feelings, you should wait for the right time to confront them. You have to prepare yourself, increase your self-confidence and ease of mind; only then will you stand a real chance of looking anxiety in the eye and uttering to yourself: this is just a negative agitation trying to get a hold of me, but I’m prepared- I may be afraid – but I’m used to it, so it’s not a problem.
