If you want to feel less anxious, you must unlearn all the unhelpful myths and misconceptions you’ve heard about anxiety. Here are 7 of the most common anxiety myths out there and how they can unintentionally make you feel worse about yourself and how it actually works.
You need to understand the origins of your anxiety
The initial cause of anxiety is rarely the maintaining cause.
- Your anxiety is being caused by your habits in the present-chronic worry, for example, or obsessive reassurance-seeking. Until you address those maintaining causes, your anxiety will persist.
5 Quick Ways to Feel Less Anxious
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Anxiety is dangerous
When you worry about anxiety, you teach your brain to believe (incorrectly) that anxiety is dangerous, which only makes you more anxious
- The best way to not get stuck in long term anxiety is to stop worrying about your anxiety in the moment and be accepting of it instead
Worry and Anxiety are the Same Thing
Worry is a thought or series of thoughts
- Anxiety is an emotion or class of emotions
- You can control your thinking but you can’t control your emotions-not directly, anyway.
- Change your emotions indirectly through changing how you think.
You need coping skills to manage your anxiety
They provide short-term relief from anxiety at the expense of long-term suffering
- For example, if you immediately close your eyes and do a mindfulness meditation, you’re teaching your brain that it’s not okay to feel anxious-that anxiety is bad
- This means the next time you feel anxious, you will feel anxious about being anxious
It’s all in your head
Anxiety can be caused by unhealthy relationships
- One of the biggest reasons people get stuck in patterns of chronic worry is because they are not assertive enough and don’t know how to set healthy boundaries
- The best way to reduce anxiety is to look at your relationships instead
Anxiety is a weakness
While many people can acknowledge intellectually that feeling anxious isn’t a sign of weakness, they still feel that way experientially, especially in the moment.
- Even though intellectually wouldn’t say that anxiety is weakness, your self-talk in that moment suggests otherwise.
Anxiety is just something you’re born with
There is no anxiety gene that predetermines who will struggle with anxiety and who will not
- Anxiety comes from learning and experience
- The good news is that what is learned can be unlearned
- And no matter what happened in your past to create the habits of anxiety, it’s always possible to build new habits in the present
