People used to say to me, “You’re so chilled! You don’t seem to worry about anything.” That was true until I reached my mid-20s.
I left home when I was 19, and everything seemed wonderful and bright. I had fun with my friends, and I did well at the university. After graduated, I started working in the import industry as a buyer, and that was when my anxiety started to kick in. I was constantly working towards deadlines, having to find solutions to problems within minutes, dealing with politics internally, checking emails at 2am in the morning, 3-hour commuting daily, and the list goes on. Don’t get me wrong, I loved my job, I loved the team I worked with, but it was a lot of ongoing stress that didn’t have time or space to address and manage. Even then my colleagues thought I was pretty relaxed and managing it all very well.
I was anxious, and I didn’t even know what it was. My heart was really tight, I had to take regular deep breaths to stay alive (felt like it anyway), my palms were sweaty, I would go light headed, and my fingers would go tingly. I wasn’t great at communicating this to anybody because I didn’t want people to think I was weak. I felt like I had to proof myself all the time. Looking back, that wasn’t healthy at all, and it was stupid to think like that. Of course, because of my own attitude, my anxiety got much worse.
One day, I broke down, and I realised that I couldn’t live like that for the rest of my life. So I started to do a lot of research and learn all the ins and outs about anxiety. I felt so much better just having awareness of how the human brain worked, and why I had certain emotional and physical reactions towards different people or events.
Our family traits, childhood events, and past experiences all contribute to how we feel today. As you can imagine it isn’t an easy task to change how we feel or think overnight. We have to go all the way back, analyze the past events, the people in our lives, and our personality. Once we address all the important factors, we can release and eventually heal.
Having awareness was such a breakthrough for me. Now I know when anxiety creeps up on me, and I can take a series of actions to soothe it before it gets any worse. It wasn’t easy to start with, and it took a lot of practice and willpower. I lived like that for years, and it would take more than a few days to make a change. It took time to train my brain to think in a certain way, and I had to remind myself why it was important to do this.
It sounds selfish, but I care about myself, and that’s why I refuse to just let it consume me. I’m responsible for my body and my mind, so I look after myself in every aspect of my life. I want to inspire my little girl, so she knows she could make a change if she wanted to.
I want to share with you on how I manage anxiety and feel content like I do most of the time.
Essential Oils
Essential oils play a crucial part in my journey. They are fat-soluble, which means they look after us on a cellular level. All essential oils have positive impacts on our emotions, like calming, relaxing, invigorating, energizing, etc.
Here are my go-to combinations of oils for soothing anxious feelings; I inhale them or apply them on areas where I feel the tension:
Wild Orange + Peppermint
Bergamot + Basil
doTERRA Balance blend
Frankincense + Lavender
Awareness
Understand that how I’m feeling now is only temporary and it will pass, and it’s only chemical reactions happening in my physical body. I make anxiety my friend, not my enemy. Shift my mind and focus on the positive things. This isn’t easy, but it’s achievable.
Empathy
I always believe that even the most awful person in the world, there must be something good about him/her. If someone upsets me, I will try to work out the possible reasons why he/she behaves like that. At the end of this process, I feel sorry for them instead of being mad at them.
Silence
I give myself time and space to think and calm down. I go for a walk or simply meditate for a few minutes. I love going to the top of a hill when I feel anxious, by looking at the big world out there, my problems seem a lot smaller.
Exercise
Most of us know that our body produces happy chemicals when we exercise. Believe me, there are times I could not drag myself out to do anything, but I shift my focus onto how I feel after a workout, that usually does the trick.
Rest
During sleep, our body and mind start the healing process. Imagine you have an emotional bucket, this bucket gets emptied every night during your sleep, and so you can have an empty bucket to work with the next day. If this doesn’t happen properly, you would have a half-filled bucket the next day, and you would start your day feeling stressed.
Gut Health
This is not the most exciting subject, and you’ve heard it all before, I know, I’ve been there! However, I can’t stress how important a healthy gut is for our emotional wellbeing. I’m not going to list everything here, as it would be unrealistic. I would say, start with eating clean and limiting sugar intake. I had to eliminate food like bread and milk from my diet, and it was so tough! I would never look back though because I feel so much better.
I used to be such a cynic towards supplements. I didn’t believe in them, and I didn’t think I needed them. To cut a long story short, I used to have poor gut health, and different supplements helped restore it in a big way. That includes multivitamins, Omega 3, probiotics, and enzymes. Our gut is the second brain. If we have poor gut health, we suffer emotionally.
Never aim too big, change a tiny bit at a time. We thrive on small wins as they give us satisfaction and motivation. For example, instead of having 4 cans of coke a day, have 3.
I hope you can relate to my journey and have taken something from this.
Take care!
Ivy x
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