How to stop feeling anxious about anxiety | Tim Box | TEDxFolkestone

Hi, my name is Tim Box and I'm

feeling

anxious

. I feel

anxious

about whether or not I will remember what I came to say. I feel anxious about whether or not you will agree with what I came to say and yes. I'm completely honest, up until about 30 seconds ago I was

feeling

a little anxious about tripping over this rug on the way out, but I think feeling anxious about these things, even though they seem pointless, is maybe understandable after all, it's important to me that I say exactly what I came here to say that my message is heard and I managed to do it without falling on my face.

Yes,

anxiety

makes sense right now, but there was a time in my life when

anxiety

really didn't make sense. I used to be feeling the kind of anxiety that meant I would have a hard time even walking into a room with that many people in it let alone standing in front and giving a talk now obviously something has changed since then otherwise I wouldn't I would be here now and I think the main thing that has changed is that while I still experience anxiety, I no longer suffer from it, but I didn't achieve this change by trying to get rid of it.

Don't get me wrong in the past, that's exactly what it was. trying to do I would do my best to avoid any situation that causes me anxiety. I would organize my daily movements by specifically avoiding social situations. If you felt anxiety starting to flare up. I would run away. I would do everything I could to retreat to a safe place and then employ. various distraction techniques to get my mind off the horribly uncomfortable feeling that something bad was about to happen turns out that was my big mistake. You see, you don't get rid of anxiety by trying to get rid of it, the truth is that I can't get rid of anxiety at all now because of some twist of fate or perhaps as a direct result of what I went through back then.

I now work with those who suffer from anxiety to help them understand and ultimately overcome those feelings. I spent much of the last ten years. Years of talking to people who suffer from anxiety about their anxiety and although everyone I spoke to had their own individual story, their own personal journey with anxiety, each of them at some point expressed the exact same desire that I used to have the desire to get rid of anxiety completely, can you imagine if we all achieved a world without anxiety what they would look like? Well, for example, this room would probably look empty.

Anxiety is the feeling that tells us when something is worth demanding our attention, so in some ways it was. anxiety that reminded you that you had somewhere to be today without it none of us would have turned up and those who accidentally did will be looking at an empty stage none of us would have business careers because we wouldn't have considered it worth bothering to study and get qualifications . and none of us would have boyfriends, girlfriends, husbands or wives, here or at home, because we simply would not have seen the value in washing and dressing to make a good impression on that very important first date that we probably forgot to go to.

Until then it seems like anxiety is important but of course there are those who don't feel anxiety, there are two very different groups, the first group, dead people, dead people, they don't feel anxious, you know, and I think that's fine, they're dead. I have enough to not worry about the second group would be those we could refer to as psychopaths, those people who for some reason lack the ability to care about the consequences of their actions or those of anyone else, now I don't know how. We were raised, but as a child I was given the distinct impression that being part of either of these two groups would not be desirable, so if being anxiety-free would be such a bad idea, why do we consider feeling anxiety to be so negative now? ?

The very obvious answer to that question is that it feels horrible when we suffer from high levels of anxiety for a long period of time; Very quickly it can begin to dominate our lives and even define our existence, of course we are going to try to get rid of it. but what happens if we can't? What if all our attempts to control our anxiety response ultimately fail and where do we go? I think most people go to their local doctor and I have to say I'm a big fan at the moment. of doctors have saved my life on more than one occasion and I have enormous sympathy for them when it comes to treating anxiety issues because it's really not what they signed up for and it's certainly not what they are trained to do when they do.

When it comes to anxiety, doctors are restricted in three important ways: firstly, the time you have for an appointment with your local GP is between 8 and 11 minutes, which is not enough time to diagnose and treat effectively. an anxiety problem, secondly, doctors are taught that anxiety is a mental illness and yet they are not mental health specialists, if a doctor wants to become one of those, they have to train for five or six more years to become a psychiatrist and thirdly, medical resources are very poorly supported when it comes to actually treating anxiety, I can put you on a 12 to 16 week waiting list for some type of counseling, but when We get to the doctor and probably need help so desperately that they tell us we now have to wait three or four months to talk to some.

It's not helpful, that leaves the only other option: medication. I am not a fan of medicating anxiety now, although I am well aware that taking drugs can change the way we feel back in the 90s. I witnessed many of my friends one Saturday night discover that very simple truth, but With medication comes all sorts of unpredictable and unpleasant side effects and in the unlikely event that we find the medication that suits you and calms your anxiety response without any side effects, then of course it is very easy now to consider ourselves dependent. of that drug and then the possibility of developing a dependence on our anti-anxiety medication simply becomes something else, feeling anxious about the truth: a medical solution to a non-medical problem is not going to solve that. problem, at best it will simply solve it for a short time.

The irony here is that most people I've talked to already know all of this, they know that the doctor is not a good option for our anxiety, which then begs the A very obvious question, so why do we go there? ? I think we go there because nowadays we are told that anxiety is a disease and this is perhaps the only sure outcome of going to the doctor for his anxiety. You will leave there labeled with anxiety. Maybe you've even been diagnosed with an anxiety disorder and now have something new to feel anxious about. During the thousands of conversations I've had with people who suffer from anxiety, there was a common thread when asked what worried them most.

The answer was generally: The anxiety they felt and if it ever

stop

ped, this worry is created and fueled almost entirely by the idea that anxiety is a disease. Anxiety is not a disease. Anxiety is an emotion. Every emotion is important. Every emotion has a purpose. Every emotion is natural and vital. part of our human experience in that sense, anxiety is no more sinister than any other feeling we might have if we didn't feel that anxiety would be one emotion less of the complete set that would really be a disorder. I want to share with you now an analogy that could help us in some way understand our emotional responses.

I want you to think of your mind as a ship. Each ship has a captain and a crew. In this analogy, the captain is your logical, rational, conscious part of your thinking. It is the part that knows where it wants to go, why it wants to go there and has a clear idea of ​​how it thinks it will get there, unfortunately, the part of our mind that has its hands and all the things that govern and navigate our ship, that It's the crew, that's your subconscious. Your subconscious is in charge of all your automatic responses, so your thought and behavior patterns, your belief systems and perhaps most importantly, your emotions, your crew navigate your ship triggering the responses. appropriate emotional responses, for example, if we consider something to be dangerous, our crew might trigger the feeling of fear, we have felt uncomfortable and this feeling will encourage us to move away from danger to return to comfort if we believe we have been harmed, a member of our crew could trigger anger, we will be energized and our focus will be drawn to take whatever action is necessary to right the wrong, so what about anxiety?

Why does our crew trigger that particular emotion now? No doubt each of us will have our own idea about what anxiety means to us, but simply put, anxiety is the emotion that tells us when something is too important to simply lose focus; it is the voice of worry about an upcoming event or situation that refuses to be ignored is the crew telling the captain that he should pay attention to this now here is the important part that your crew plays They operate on a very simple principle, they are trying to find the best strategy to achieve the greater happiness.

Yes, security is important, after all, security is a big component of happiness. We can't feel happy if we don't feel safe, but ultimately nothing. Sometimes your crew is trying to guide you in the direction of happiness, as American author Jon Shed once wrote: A ship in harbor is safe, but ships aren't built for that, so even when your crew makes you feel terrible about telling yourself things about "You don't want to hear those seemingly self-destructive thoughts. I'm not good enough. I'll never make it. I'm not worthy of being loved. Even these harsh words are designed simply to keep you away from any situation that could lead to an experience." unhappy.

We are not trying to sink the ship, they are simply trying to steer it away from the stormy seas that we fear we will not be able to face, but every decision your crew makes is based on the things they have learned throughout their lives and because many of these things you will learn them when you were very young some of them no longer apply some of them were simply wrong in the first place what this means is that when it comes to anxiety your crew will very often make mistakes, but just because they make mistakes doesn't make them wrong. become enemies and yet this is a sentiment I hear all the time: anxiety is the enemy, people want to throw those crew members overboard and I can understand that after all, considering that a part of our mind is now actively trying to destroy so of course it would be easy to see it as the enemy if we then believe that our mind has turned against us it will be easy to conclude that our mind is broken it would be easy to believe that person who told us the The way you feel means you're sick.

I started this talk by telling you that I used to suffer from debilitating levels of social anxiety. So how could I control that? What did I actually do to reduce it? There are three main things I did that I think helped me change. The first thing I did was I refused to believe that I was sick from all the things I felt anxious about. I decided not to feel anxious about feeling anxious. I recognize that every time I felt anxiety it was not random, it was always triggered by a situation or a process of anxiety. Thought once I understood this I was able to do the second thing is listen to my team.

I spent too much time pushing them away trying to ignore what they were saying to me when you ignore someone with an important message they might start talking louder. be heard if you continue to ignore them they might start screaming the only way I was going to

stop

anxiety from screaming at me to listen to it to hear what it was telling me. I tried to understand what my crew was trying to achieve with these feelings and turn my enemies into my friends and the funny thing is that when you start listening, you hear what your mind is trying to tell you, you can stop screaming, when the crew stops shout, you can hear the captain, that is the point where you are most logical thinking comes to have some information that you can decide if this feeling is appropriate or inappropriate, useful or useless once you have the ear of your team and you know what you would want from them, the third thing, perhaps the most important thing is always Always be nice to them if you are like me, you spent a lot of your life punishing yourself for the things you did wrong or for the things you didn't do right or simply because of how you feel about all the criticism. and the negativity you have received from others throughout your life the person who has given you the most is probably you this has the cumulative effect of destroying the morale on board your ship a demoralized crew equals low self-esteem and low self-esteem means overcoming The slightest challenge will create anxiety, but the good news is that you can repair the damage that has been done very easily simply by deciding from now onGo ahead and always talk to yourself with your team with kindness and positivity.

People do their best work when they feel empowered to achieve what their team is all about. It's no different, simply, if you punish yourself, you end up winning, if you get stronger, who knows how far we can go. So I think it's okay, maybe even important to feel anxiety every day of our lives, it means that the crew is still sailing the ship and still trying to take it in the right direction it's a part of you that makes you reread the important email before sending it. It's the part that makes sure you check your keys or your pocket before you send the front door. when you leave in the morning and it's the part that makes your heart skip a little when you think about giving that important presentation at work or at the theater the truth is that I still feel anxious all the time for example every Friday morning I wake up feeling Anxious because Friday is dumpster day, my team wakes me up with the thought that I have to go take out the dumpsters now.

It's not a debilitating anxiety, it's barely a whisper, it's loud enough to be heard and then when I took out the containers it was gone. And this might seem like a really trivial example, but it's exactly the kind of thing we'll worry about if we think the way we feel isn't normal. I wonder if in the past, when I suffered from high levels of anxiety, if I were diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, I would now dread Friday mornings. Would I feel anxious at the prospect of my anxiety? breaking out again I'd curse myself for not being anxiety-free yet there tend to be overly popular positions on high anxiety the first state is a mental illness it's the way you're wired there's little we can do about it the second state isn't real , it's all in your head, you just need to get over it, neither of these positions are helpful and they are both wrong, the last 10 years have taught me that the truth is somewhere in between, of course it's real, we didn't ask to feel that way. and yet, even though we feel this way now it doesn't mean we can't change it, the first step towards change is to accept it once we accept anxiety as a natural part of our human experience and treat it not as our enemy, but as a friend of confidence, you will be surprised how quickly the crew gets the boat back on track and we begin to feel much less anxious about anxiety.

So how are you feeling today? Do you feel anxious about something good? I mean, you're alive. It means that, as a part of you, I am trying to tell you something important, listen to it, I am here to help you. My name is Tim Box and now, 18 minutes later, I feel much less anxious. Thank you so much.