Xian Yu answered the reader's question: How can I not be anxious?

foreword

Recently, I launched the "Xian Yu Answers Reader's Questions" activity. If you have any questions you want to ask, please leave a message and I will answer them in order.

text

What is anxiety?

Quoting the explanation in Wikipedia:

Anxiety is an emotional reflection of a person's serious deterioration in the value characteristics of real or future things. The opposite emotional form is expectation, that is, expectation is the emotional reflection of people's apparent favorable trend towards the value characteristics of reality or future things.

Anxiety refers to an unpleasant complex emotional state such as tension, anxiety, worry, annoyance, etc., produced by an individual about an imminent and possible danger or threat.

Therefore, the objective purpose of anxiety is beneficial, and its function is to guide people to quickly take various measures and urgently mobilize various value resources to effectively prevent the trend of serious deterioration of the value characteristics of real or future things, and make them move towards Development in a favorable direction.

Imagine that in ancient times, it was precisely because of human anxiety about food, housing, and beasts in the cruel natural environment that human beings could take timely actions to ensure the continuation of human beings.

So anxiety is a normal human reaction, but if you are often anxious, it is easy to feel uneasy because of some small things, and it is accompanied by symptoms such as extreme tension, headache, palpitations, palpitations, restlessness, and a feeling of heaviness in the stomach. Maybe, you suffer from anxiety, I suggest you go to the hospital for medical treatment.

When I was looking up the information, I saw that many people recommended this book "Self-Rescue of Mental Anxiety Disorders (Pathological Analysis Volume)", with a Douban score of 8.2, you can also refer to it.

However, most people should not be so serious. In the face of anxiety, I have the following suggestions:

1. Accept rather than escape or fight

Faced with anxiety, we often respond in two ways.

The first is to escape, to use the so-called "busy" to fill their hearts, but different people choose to be "busy" in different ways. Some people use work to escape. The biggest advantage of this method is that it is "justified". Faced with the persuasion or accusation of others, they can find plausible excuses for themselves, such as "I am at work, doing important things. What's going on?" or "I'm so busy with work, I don't have time." In fact, I know it better than anyone else deep down, which is just an excuse to deceive myself. Similar to work, there are reading, housework, etc., which can all find reasonable and positive excuses for themselves.

Some people use nipple music to escape, listen to music, watch anime and play games, watch news, swipe Douyin and then swipe on Moments, and click on each software to remove the little red dots. Obviously there is no news, but I always feel that the next time I click on it. There will be news, and I know the content inside, but I will read it again. I really have nothing to do. I will pick up the things I usually don’t bother to do, organize the picture folder, change the skin and font, and frantically search for various things to do. Something that is effortless and a little worthwhile and happy.

But either way, as soon as you stop, anxiety will immediately pop up, make yourself restless, and then continue to escape, falling into a vicious circle.

The second way is to fight, to get rid of the anxiety, and then to ruminate on these thoughts and emotions, trying to find a solution. But when you are anxious, the more you think, the more you feel that these unreliable thoughts are real. In the end, these emotions and so-called beliefs become stronger, forming a vicious circle.

Don't we have another way to respond? Of course there is, this is the core method mentioned in many books - acceptance. But what does it mean to accept it?

I think the most important step in this step is to give up. Give up fighting, giving up trying to control your fears and thinking about "what to do" through constant self-analysis. Give up escape, allow the existence of anxiety in consciousness, and be willing to coexist with it, after all, its objective purpose is to help us.

If you just have anxiety, you can tell yourself, "These emotions are temporary and will go away soon. I allow it to be there. Now I can try to feel the emotion because it will flow away soon. ".

And if you're still anxious to the point of having a stomach cramp, be prepared to have a stomach cramp and do what you want.

Then after you accept it, the stomach cramps will go away immediately? Of course that's impossible. Usually, when you don't struggle, your emotions will gradually calm down and your symptoms will gradually weaken, but your body has habitually made a stress response to this anxiety, eliminating this Stress takes longer.

2. read more books

If you go directly to Baidu to search for "how to treat anxiety", you will see a lot of discussions like this, "I have read a lot of books and tried countless methods, but all of them can cure the symptoms but not the root cause..." However, you can never solve this kind of nonsense. Don't believe it, thinking that reading is useless.

In fact, people have done research and exploration on anxiety for many years, and it cannot be said to be mature, but at least there are more effective theories, methods and practices. Find more books that are generally recommended and well-rated, especially those with high ratings. Those books on the principles of anxiety have a clearer understanding of anxiety and will help you face anxiety.

To combat anxiety, the most important thing is to rely on yourself. The Buddha does not cross everyone. Explore the methods from the book, and if you can’t do it well, it will work for you. For example, I saw such a method in the book. Every time I am anxious, I write down things: I am very anxious on a certain day in a certain year, what is the content of my anxiety, what is the specific thing I am worried about, Then wait for the matter to pass, and then write the real results.

Write down a few more of these things, and soon you'll find that none of the things you worry about happen often. So when anxious things happen again, I think of those anxiety experiences in the past, and I feel, sorry, this time it's just a paper tiger. Anxiety was relieved a lot.

Of course, in addition to books that directly talk about anxiety, I think it is better to read other books, such as humanities and social sciences, astronomy and geography, etc., and think more about the universe, life, country, society, and nature. Such macroscopic things cannot be said to be for the present. The dimensionality reduction of suffering, but against the backdrop of these grand things, the seemingly urgent things in life have become indifferent, and the mood will naturally ease.

In addition to this benefit, long-term reading, thinking and practice will help you break through cognitive limitations. When faced with many things, you can stand on a higher level of thinking and have a clear understanding of the results of things. Knowing, naturally no longer worry about these things.

3. meditation

What makes meditation useful is that the mindfulness training in it allows us to not be hijacked by our thoughts and emotions. Meditation is not trying to drive away the clouds, but moving a chair into the garden, sitting and watching the clouds and clouds, facing those thoughts in your mind, whether you hate it or not, whether you like it or not, don't force, don't resist, don't struggle, calm down. accept yourself.

Using the term in psychology is "cognitive dissociation", which separates the self from the content of thinking, memory, feeling, and language rules, and objectively looks at thought activities as external things, and regards ideas as language and words themselves, and Not what it stands for.

Meditation is the best way to practice cognitive dissociation.

However, in the face of the emotions in their minds, people can't control themselves, and it is easy to get caught up in them. Therefore, meditation needs to be practiced daily. If you only think of meditating when anxiety strikes, you will often be tortured by anxiety because your level is not at home, and finally fall into a vicious circle of escape or struggle.

4. action

There is a person who admires Yang Jiang very much. When he was about to graduate from high school, he wrote a long letter to Yang Jiang, expressing his admiration for him and some of his life confusion.

Yang Jiang replied, on light yellow vertical red checkered letter paper, with calligraphy. In addition to greetings and some sentences of encouragement to the younger generation, Yang Jiang's letter actually contained only one sentence, which was sincere but not polite:

"Your problem is mainly that you don't read too much and think too much".

It's not an exaggeration to describe anxiety. Anxiety is essentially an emotion caused by the uncertainty of the future. The reason why action can help us overcome anxiety is because we can make us have a clearer understanding of the uncertainty of the future through action, and even allow us to reverse it. This uncertainty is certainty.

So if you feel anxious about something in the future, start preparing, prepare until you are satisfied, focus on the things you can change, and make it perfect, although the structure may still be uncertain, but in case If it is achieved, even if it is not achieved, you have to believe that life is a long journey. The things we have done may not have achieved the desired results at the moment, but it is likely to give back to you in the future.

"I taste that I don't eat all day long, I don't sleep all night, thinking is useless, it's better to learn." Instead of worrying, it is better to practice meditation every day and read more good books. When faced with anxiety, don't run away, don't Fight, try to feel it, accept it, and then gradually resolve the anxiety with action.

series of articles

The full list of Xian Yu's answers to readers' questions: https://github.com/mqyqingfeng/Blog

If you like or have inspiration, welcome to star, which is also an encouragement to the author.