What is Anxiety?

Anxiety can be simply defined as a natural mental body’s response to stress or fear. It basically activates the “flight or fight” response where either you feel like running away from the situation or fighting the situation. But in both the cases feeling the pressure of fear deep into your core. Even though anxiety can be considered as a very normal and natural emotion, but when it impacts your day-to-day life, then the effects are severe, and it hampers your logical reasoning and thinking capacity.

What causes Anxiety?
Anxiety is not a result of one single reason. It is usually a combination of multiple triggers playing together. Some of the causes can be as follows:

• Genetics: Our genetics play quite a significant role in our life. All the events that our ascendants have faced in their lives is coded in our DNA that includes both the happy ones as well as traumatic ones too. Hence, it is important to identify if there have been incidents of huge trauma in the family like holocaust, genocides or dealing with extreme weather conditions or famine like conditions. Sometimes, this trauma is so deeply rooted in us, that we fail to understand why it is happening.
• Medications: Medication can have a large impact on the chemical make-up of our body. At times, over the counter medications can cause anxiety such as birth control pills or cough & cold medicines, weight loss medications or any anti-allergens. Hence, it is important to find if it is the medications playing their role in triggering anxiety like conditions.
• Environmental Conditions: Job pressure, relationship stress, social peer pressure can be some of the environmental conditions affecting you and can be the cause of anxiety.
• Irregular Eating Habits: Given the fast-paced life we are living, many of us focus only on work and tend to ignore or skip meals. Our stomach needs food on time and ignoring the body alarm can send the body in a panic situation which leads to anxiety.
• Financial Worries: This is one of the biggest anxieties causes in the modern world. We all want to have everything in life and we pay a heavy price for it like sleepless nights, ignoring health, ignoring our meals and the result is anxiety. We don’t listen to our body clock, there is no mental outlet for worries and concerns which makes us weak mentally.

 These are just a few causes for anxiety, but there can be many more.

Dealing with Anxiety:

Dealing with anxiety is definitely important as it has the power to hamper our day-to-day activities on a huge level. Here are a few ways, I have shared with people to deal with anxiety before it ruins them:

• Nature Time twice a week: Nature is the most powerful healing tool for any kind of mental problems. And anxiety is in the mind, so nature is a beautiful answer to this problem. Talking a walk into plush greenery can help you re-activate the natural healing mechanism of the body. Likewise, watching a water body like a lake or a river can be really soothing as it has the power to let your emotions flow. Water is associated with emotions and venting out emotions naturally can be most healing. Sit beside a lake and just watch the water flow. Imagine with the flowing water, the stuck-up emotions are also flowing. This will release the cluttered thoughts and re-align your mental health. Doing these exercises in nature twice a week is highly recommended to heal anxiety naturally.
• Modify your physical position: Let’s say the moment you’re feeling anxious and you’re sitting. Then, stand up immediately and take a few deep breaths. Have a glass of water. Ensure to change your position within 60 seconds to overcome this anxiety and arrest it before it overpowers you.
  A client of mine once was standing in a queue to get his visa at an embassy and suddenly started feeling anxious as to whether he will get the visa or not. He left the queue immediately, went to the washroom and screamed out loud and was shaking his body. This allowed all the anxious energy to drain out on the spot. And he went back in the queue only to get his visa positively.

• Breathing exercises: Breathing is an involuntary movement of our body. But it does hold a lot of healing power in it. When breathing is done consciously, it can help release those negative feelings and emotions with ease which otherwise can overpower you and create anxiety. Hence, whenever you feel anxious from within, start inhaling from your nose and exhale all the anxiety from your mouth. Do a minimum of 11 rounds of this breathing. You will notice a considerable change in your thoughts, feelings and emotions.
• Eating Healthy: It is a very old saying – What you eat, is what you become. Hence, eating in itself should be an experience of being in touch with the Divine. The food we eat is offered to us by Nature. So, when it is cooked with love and compassion and consumed with loving thoughts too, it has the power to transform your thoughts into positive thoughts. Make it a conscious effort to cook and eat with love, compassion and gratitude towards Mother Earth for offering us this wonderful food. Make a loving relationship with your food instead of eating it just because the body is asking for it. This can help create more positive energy in your body and anxiety dying on its own.