Whether you are an anxious person, you have an anxiety disorder, or you suffer from occasional bouts of angst, we all know that feeling of nervousness and dread.
According to Amen Clinic. anxiety can sometimes be mildly distracting, and at other times, all-consuming. Anxiety affects us on many levels, impacting our emotions and our bodies as physical sensations, and often contributing to negative thoughts. The effects include:
Motivation: While overwhelming anxiety can lead to paralysis, some anxiety can motivate you to take action when facing challenges, According to Amen Clinics. In a study focused on the benefits of worry, the researchers noted that worry illuminates the importance of taking action to prevent an undesirable outcome. For example, anxiety and worry may motivate you to work diligently to avoid failure and successfully complete a work or school project.
A 2018 study found that some anxious people in work environments have learned to harness anxiety to help them focus on tasks. They use their anxiety to regulate their performance. Anxiety can be very useful when it comes to things like test-taking and competition. Research shows that students and athletes who experienced some anxiety actually displayed improved performance on tests or while participating in competitive sports.
Resilience: In a presentation at the 2019 annual convention of the American Psychological Association (APA), psychologists acknowledged the beneficial role stress and anxiety can play in our everyday lives. Specifically, one presenter, Dr. Lisa Damour, noted that the stress and anxiety inherent in taking on a challenge and working to the edge of our abilities can actually make us stronger and more resilient when we are faced with new difficulties. She said that moderate levels of stress and anxiety “can have an inoculating function, which leads to higher than average resilience.” Examples of anxiety helping to build resilience may occur when you start a new job or take on a more challenging role at work.
Cautiousness: Anxiety is designed to protect us from danger and allow us to react quickly to emergencies. Anxious feelings are part of the fight-or-flight stress response. Practically speaking, for example in California, when the warm Santa Ana winds start blowing in the fall, anxiety may put you on alert and prompt you to trim the foliage surrounding your home in case a brush fire erupts. On the other side of the nation, the fear of flooding from a looming hurricane may drive you to use sandbags to protect your property.
Anxious people also tend to be more cautious, and that’s a good thing. A U.K. study found that anxious adolescents had fewer accidents and accidental deaths in early adulthood than those who did not suffer from anxiety. In cases like this, anxiety may serve to keep you safe – and alive!
Longevity: In 1921, psychologist Lewis Terman at Stanford University in California embarked on what has become the world’s longest-running longitudinal study. It began with 1,500 children starting at age 11 into adulthood, collecting a variety of data that might predict later success. The fascinating results show that the trait most associated with longevity was conscientiousness. The don’t-worry-be-happy people died the earliest from accidents and preventable illnesses because they tended to underestimate risks.
A new study from the University of Edinburgh and University College London that examined health information on more than 500,000 people also found that people who are highly neurotic (anxious people) are more likely to live longer. The researchers believe that their worrying dispositions drove them to underestimate their wellness and take action to check and care for their health. In other words, they were very vigilant about their health. Meanwhile, the non-neurotic patients were less likely to seek treatment for symptoms and had health difficulties later on!
Warning Signs: Anxiety can be like a red flag or warning sign to an area of your life that needs attention. In this regard, the unpleasantness of recurrent worry and nervousness may be serving you well. Dr. Damour, the APA presenter mentioned above, noted this positive attribute of anxiety in her talk. She described anxiety as an internal alarm system that was handed down by evolution to alert us to both internal and external threats.
Perhaps you have anxiety about something your teenage child is doing and it’s telling you to pay attention and take action, or maybe you need to end a relationship that is no longer working, or maybe your anxiety is increasing because you have an important deadline approaching, and you need to get working. Whatever the warning signal is, your anxiety may be alerting you to take notice or action on something very important.
Empathy: Suffering makes us more empathetic human beings, and that is definitely the case when it comes to suffering from anxiety. Personal struggles with painful anxious feelings have likely made you a more empathetic person, according to research. That means you may be more sensitive to, loving, and accepting of loved ones and people in general who are dealing with personal challenges. The world is a better place with more empathetic people.
Good Leadership: Leaders need to run multiple scenarios and be prepared for any outcome. It turns out that anxious people are really good at this, and often prepared for a crisis when it arrives. These are very important qualities for effective leaders.
Interestingly, data shows that anxious people process threats differently, using areas of the brain that are responsible for taking action. Anxious people react quickly in times of danger and tend to be more comfortable with uncomfortable feelings.
If these qualities are applied intelligently, anxious leaders are wonderful at making their teams more resourceful, productive, and creative.
A double-edged sword
While moderate amounts of anxiety can be beneficial in the ways just mentioned, too much anxiety can cause panic attacks, health problems, and destructive behavior. If your anxiety is out of control, or if it’s interfering with your daily life, it’s time to seek professional help.
Sure your marriage is a mistake?
Straight to the point! If about 50 percent of people wish they had never ended their marriage, is there something that could have been done differently to avoid the crash?
Many people who cite loads of reasons to divorce, soon have second thoughts. That a survey, commissioned as part of the DVD release of The Love Punch in UK, 50 per cent of divorcees have regrets about their break-up, a study revealed. Researchers found that after the dust settled, 54 per cent experienced second thoughts about whether they had made the right decision, with many realising they miss or still love their ex-partner.
For some, the regrets have been so severe that 42 per cent have had moments where they considered giving their relationship another go, with a large percentage actually making the effort to try again and 21 per cent of those still together now. Almost half of those even went as far as to say they are happier or stronger than they were before the divorce.
Many people get to this regrettable position from initial mistakes they make in their relationships. Most common is mistaking lust or infatuation for love. Both are not love, and could therefore not be foundation on which marriage should be based.
Lust is an emotion or feeling of intense desire in the body. A large physical attraction for an individual, that is sometimes uncontrollable and completely unreasonable. It is often confused with love, but lust is not love if you don’t wish to do anything other than have sex with someone.
Infatuation is defined as an intense but short-lived passion or admiration for someone or something. Short-lived passion or admiration!
Some red flags on infatuation have been identified in dating by experts:
• The infatuation is the whole relationship. There is no depth or commonalities between you beyond the infatuation.
• You’re so caught up in the chemistry of initial attraction that you miss the red flags and their true personality.
• You’re crazy about them while knowing full well that the person is bad for you.
• You’re committed but not fully committed because you think about others and wonder about greener grass.
• You know at some level that you are wasting your time with this person that you would never otherwise have a long term relationship with.
And the following, according to Lucinda Loveland are some big lies about love. So interesting the way she presents them.
That “Happily Ever After” Exists. Romantic movies and heart-warming stories filled with idealistic endings show fictional characters up to the point where they embark on the trail to “happily ever after”. People are left believing that the couples they watch in film had an amazing future well after the films ended. The realities of making a marriage healthy and happy is hardly portrayed in films, TV shows or romance novels.
That the Secret to a Happy Marriage is Finding Mr. or Mrs. Right. People think that the secret to a great marriage is finding the perfect life mate. But this assumes that you know all the characteristics necessary to make someone “Mr. or Mrs. Right;” that you can find “Mr. or Mrs. Right” in your twenties or thirties; that “Mr. or Mrs. Right” will think that you too are “Mr. or Mrs. Right;” and that they want to marry you. Instead of searching for the ideal husband or wife, realize that that no one is a flawless human being.
That We Will Never Fight. Culturally, we’ve been taught that conflict is bad and should be avoided at all costs. However, there is no such thing as a relationship without conflict. Conflict is inevitable because a marriage is made up of two imperfect and at times, selfish people. Actually, worse than having disagreements as a couple is avoiding conflict altogether. It is just as unhealthy, if not more, than frequent conflict. The issue itself isn’t what deteriorates a relationship, but how the issue is dealt with. Learning how to manage conflict and using skills to resolve conflicts when they arise is vital for a healthy relationship.
Marriage experts suggest rather than rushing to declare a marriage a mistake, some level of perseverance could be useful. The National Organization for Marriage reported on its Facebook recently that, “In studies of 700 miserable, ready-to-split spouses, researchers found that 2/3 of those who stayed married were happy five years later. They toughed out some of the most difficult problems a couple could face… What was their strategy? A mix of stubborn commitment, a willingness to work together on issues, and a healthy lowering of expectations.”
Every couple has irreconcilable differences. But those marriages that go the distance are those who know they are imperfect couples, who make it work and enjoy their differences together.
This is not to suggest that there are no justifiable reasons for divorce or that everybody or situation is capable of changing. There are really some write-off cases but you only know after some level of perseverance and hard work.
As they say, marriage is not easy. It requires prayers and hard work from the choice of a partner till parting in death!