What is anxiety and how do I know if I have it?
I lived with anxiety for over 20 years. It started as social anxiety mostly only large crowds and it grew to panic disorder and severe agoraphobia over time. I tried a multitude of medications. I got really good at knowing my triggers to the point it seemed OTHER PEOPLE were my triggers. At 40, I had at that time been steadily medicated about ten years I took a look at my life and realized while I was actually what you would call “mentally stable” for several years when I honestly looked inside myself - I felt dead inside. On paper, my life looked fine. Steady relationship that had been my healthiest to that point, a business that I built from an idea that suddenly was falling flat?
What did that mean? It means I suddenly wasn’t interested in the life I had spent the last seven years building. I ignored this feeling and kept going to work and then out of nowhere, massive anxiety? I had struggled with it my entire life however it was typically only an issue at this point in unfamiliar or social situations. When I was running and leading the event, for example, I was totally fine. This was no longer the case. I found myself reaching for xanax after years of not needing it and for the first time I didn’t run to the doctor. I retreated within myself.
This was likely the best decision of my life, and a major turning point. I had to understand, WHY this was happening. Where was this anxiety coming from? If anxiety is just an emotion felt in the body after the brain is worrying about the past or future then why was it striking suddenly and randomly? It was intuition in survival mode - simply a signal from my soul “I want something new.” I ignored the loss of motivation and ambition - they were the first signals. I kept pushing through because that’s what we do and what happened? The Universe took my business anyway by creating a disaster with a roof leak and management company. I had to close the doors. I ignored the signs that it was time for something new, so it was taken.
What I have come to understand firstly about anxiety is that when your nervous system is stuck in survival mode, intuition can also FEEL like anxiety. They are not the same thing, but they have a similar sensation in the body. Same with FEAR and EXCITEMENT they feel the same - yet they are different.
The problem with many of us “sensitive” folk is we unknowingly are absorbing these same sensations from people in our environment - this to me felt like a constant cloud of anxiety, nausea, agitation, general unwell. If you have this as your baseline energy - this may be your explanation as well. When you learn to discard energy that isn’t yours, you aren’t weighed down, feeling sick. It’s called energy protection, a form of energy hygiene which means to cultivate, care for, and maintain your own personal energetic and emotional state.
When you learn to cleanse your energy, stop leaking energy, and most importantly, STOP absorbing your environment you will find that daily underlying anxiety - GONE.
Sometimes it’s not anxiety. Sometimes it’s intuition, sometimes its excitement and fear mixed together and sometimes it’s NOT EVEN YOURS. Click here for my energy protection for sensitives class. Scholarship is available to those that income is a barrier. Please click here to send us an email to inquire.
