How to fight thoughts of anxiety and fear?

Anxiety and fear can trouble us in different areas of our life. A specific recurrent fear may become a source of low self-efficacy, and we believe we must fight this fear. Will it save the trouble?

What if we shift our approach from fearing our thoughts to understanding them?

The following questions can help us to understand our anxieties.

Why do certain situations, people, or tasks cause us anxiety?
What fearful thoughts do we have about these scenarios and ourselves?
What does having anxiety state about me?
Do we accept our thoughts as the ultimate reality?
Do we feel confident to challenge our thoughts and have faith in ourselves?
Do we test our feared predictions and check if they actually turn out to be true?

Anxiety can be a coping mechanism, an emotion, and an automatic response to many situations. If we want to deal with it by fighting it, then it means one party must win and the anxiety should never bother us.

It is also true that anxiety can be debilitating, not a pleasant state of mind, anyone would want to experience daily or during crucial life events. One must seek help to cope with it. It can improve their confidence and make life rewarding and calm.

How does anxiety help us?

At the same time anxiety is also an emotion that signals danger to tell us we need to protect ourselves. Hence its existence cannot be denied completely. Also, judging oneself in this fight hampers our self-esteem. We keep seeing ourselves as losers every time anxiety knocks on the door.

Acceptance and understanding our fears make the fight more of a negotiation than one party winning. We can either judge ourselves for feeling fearful or learn to perceive anxiety as an emotion, a messenger of danger.

The next step is to learn to talk back to the fear, calm it down by saying you are equipped enough to deal with the danger, or take a chill pill since now you don’t see any threat in the situation.