Anxiety is a large part of many of our stories. Anxiety is scary, it can feel debilitating, and often leaves us feeling hopeless in the battle against it.
One of my goals with this blog is to equip folks with great resources on their journey towards growth. As far as the world of anxiety goes, this book (Embracing the Fear by Judith Bemis) is one of the best resources I have found. Dr. Bemis offers wonderful tools for living with anxiety. She has written this book through the lens of research as well as her own battles with anxiety and panic attacks.
Her main argument is that we can not win when we try to fight anxiety. In fact, fighting our anxiety only makes it worse. We do not fight fire with fire. Often our natural response with anxiety (def: a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome) is to get more anxious, or mad at ourselves for feeling anxious, which compounds the initial anxiety.
I often explain anxiety as a beach ball in a swimming pool. Imagine the beach ball is in the pool and whispers to you "try to push me under water". Hours later, we are EXHAUSTED, and the ball is still full of air. Anxiety asks us to fight, engage, and escalate.
Dr. Bemis is framing a theory where we do not engage, we accept, we let it be, and we keep moving on.
This book will be a great resource for those of you who have anxiety as a part of your life.
Caveat: Change takes time. Anxiety is often something we have dealt with our entire lives. One part of this journey is accepting your anxiety. The other part is continually offering yourself patience, grace, and understanding when it gets hard. Being hard on ourselves, getting frustrated when anxiety is still around...these are all examples of the anxiety continuing to speak. In these times, it is important we continually offer ourselves patience and grace as growth slowly unfolds.
Bemis, J., & Barrada, A. (2011). Embracing the fear: Learning to manage Anxiety & Panic attacks. Hazelden Publishing.
