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Managing Stress
Coping with Anxiety
How do you accomplish the things you want to do when anxiety is a roadblock?
“Let’s get better about feeling” is written on her T-Shirt. Who is she? Well, she is Emma McAdam, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, creating and sharing content with the world. Thanks to the internet, we have more access to useful content than ever. Sometimes finding what we need is the challenge. Though technically this me introducing McAdams, she introduces herself nicely on her videos, which I highly recommend, like this one here, the Finding Your Why- the First Step to Dealing with Anxiety. Whether you know it or not, you’re already engaging in a step. Is it the right step?
If you said ‘not a fair question,” I will give you that for a moment. There is no right or wrong way to cope. There are ways that are more functional than others. There are ways that lead to greater potential for good outcomes. And there are ways to increase anxiety and misery.
Perhaps you might think handling anxiety is easy for me, being a trained therapist myself. But, I assure you, I am the classic stereotype of a counselor. I became a counselor because I wanted to help my family and heal myself. I discovered very quickly you can’t help your family, you can only heal yourself.
And I still struggle. Anxiety is a big thing for me and so listening to Emma helps me see the things I am doing okay in, things I can improve in, and provides hope.
I feel much better now that I lost all hope!
A little Buddhist joke there. In this video by Emma, the first thing I heard is ‘radical responsibility.’ That’s something I am interested in, and I don’t know if she is taking it as radically as I am, but it’s a good start to this video.
The second thing that caught my attention is that everyone has anxiety. The difference between people who do the things they want and those who don’t do things they want had the same level of anxiety, but the first group did the thing they wanted anyway, and the other group chose not to do what they wanted to avoid the anxiety altogether.
