Anxiety, Fear, Worry, and all my other friends

. . . anxiety is a fight-or-flight response to something that is happening in the mind. ~ Ihnen and Flynn

For me, most of my problems can be traced back to Fear. It doesn't matter if part of the mind looks at what is going on and says, "It's rediculous to have this fear, or worry, or anxiety," because the feeling is still there. At times the anxiety can actually attack you causing you to panic because you feel the panic will be unbarable; thus the term panic attack.

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You may have heard that most of what we worry about never happens, but the problem with worry and anxiety is found in that very phrase; specifically the word most. If all of what we worried about never happened we could toss anxiety and worry out the window. The problems is that sometimes what we worry about turns out to actually happen, and therefore, just because it once in a great while happens, we feel the fears are justified and worth our attention because of these rare instances when what was feared happened.
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While it may be true that 'a watched pot never boils', the one you don't keep an eye on can make an awful mess of your stove. -Edward Stevenson

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Anxiety is my mind thinking, "this is gunnuh hurt." I don't believe that the simplistic statement that all you need is faith, is a solution to anxiety. No one in the Bible is said to have had more faith than Job, yet this faith hero once said:

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When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise and the night be gone? And I am full of tossings to and fro unto the dawning of the day. ~Job 7:4

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I'm no doctor, so I could be very wrong, but I don't think anxiety is a lack of faith, or a physical illness or some sort of genetic defect. I believe anxiety is learned and usually it is learned early.

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Early in life, I was visited by the bluebird of anxiety. ~Woody Allen

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Again, anxiety starts with your programing. When I was very young I remember my father coming come from work. We were living in the Dangerfield Apartments in Dallas, Texas, and it was dark, windy, and cold, but my father said we all had to go out in the night and drive downtown. Why I asked and he said we had to pay the gas bill. "If I don't pay the gas bill our house will get cold and your mommy won't be able to cook us any food." I was terrified. I still think of what my father said that night, and how afraid I was that we were going to be cold and hungry.

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Of course, now, I know this was a father giving a simplistic explaination to a 5 year old child, but it was a moment of profound fear and over time became a programed anxiety. One mistake and I could lose everything, be hungry, cold, and would probably die.

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He who fears he will suffer, already suffers from his fear. - Michel de Montaigne