By Chen Lee Yun
Most people have had the experience of being worried and fidgety.
In fact, anxiety is the natural emotional response of human beings in the face of crisis. Its function is to increase alertness and make people take actions to avoid danger and deal with current difficulties in order to survive the danger.
Therefore, appropriate and short-term anxiety is normal and has a positive effect. Anxiety can cause life problems as well as damage your physical and mental health.
The effect of long-term anxiety on physical and mental health
Anxiety patients have many symptoms and discomforts that cannot be fully explained medically. Their self-assessed health is also poor.
Patients are more likely to suffer from depression, memory problems, loneliness and dissatisfaction with life, which affect physical, mental and social health in the long run.
If the elderly are often involuntarily nervous and worried, causing mental distress, or affecting their normal life, they should seek the assistance of a doctor or clinical psychologist as soon as possible.
Perfectionism
First of all, we need to think clearly, does perfection really exist? To be the best, does it have to be perfect? A certain industry or a top expert in a certain field does not know everything. We can’t be perfect, and we don’t need to be perfect, you just need to do the best you can.
Regain your sense of control
We need to limit our options in our lives. We need to make a lot of decisions every day, and you have countless choices for your feelings, work, and study. This state of having too many choices and no way to start will cause us anxiety just as we do not limit our options when facing work. For instance, eating too much, sleeping for too long or playing games for too long will make you feel emptiness afterwards that “wasted a lot of time”. This lack of self-discipline behaviour will also cause you anxiety. In fact, whether it is due to having too many choices, not knowing the way to start or the lack of self-discipline, it can make you anxious because they cause the loss of your sense of control.
Forget about work when you are not working
What causes anxiety is the feeling of being busy.
One of the reasons for this idea is our bad habit of “multi-threaded work”. When you send WeChat, reply to work emails, and make forms, the boundary between leisure and entertainment is blurred. You rarely have time not to work at all. You will feel like you are “working” all day long and hence feel restless.
The worst thing is, multi-threaded work tends to make you inefficient and the busier you become, the more anxious you will feel. Even if you are not in working hours sometimes, and occasionally there are some tasks to deal with, you will feel as if you are busy all the time.
Therefore, you should arrange your work reasonably according to your energy level at different times of the day, and then finish things quickly and in a single thread. Then, set aside a short time alone for chatting, leisure, or entertainment.
Being Stoic
Stoicism is one of the schools of late Greek philosophy. Its enlightenment to our philosophy of existence is: only focus on the parts that you can control. Your wallet is stolen, the car is rubbed, and the competition is lost.
To a large extent, you are out of your control. However, when these things happen, what you can control is your own mentality. At this time, what you need is to withdraw yourself from these annoying things, continue your life, and focus on a good state of mind that you can control.
Small methods to relieve anxiety
Taking the following four steps to write out the things in your head one by one can help solve the problem and relieve anxiety:
- Write clearly what are you worried about?
- Write down what you can do.
- Decide what to do.
- Follow the decision immediately.
A healthy lifestyle can make you go further. Please consider your health as the most important thing.
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