Why Learning Resilience is So Important in Anxiety Management

Even relatively moderate anxiety can significantly impact our lives, wreaking havoc before we realize whats happening. Making anxiety management difficult.

It can cause us to make poor decisions, raise stress levels that hurts our health both short-term and long-term. It impacts our relationships and performance at work, and even make us just downright miserable.

Its natural, therefore, that when many people look to treat anxiety, they justifiably want a quick, immediate fix. They want to solve the problem quickly, and for that to be all there is to it.

While that would be incredible, in reality, thats not quite how it works. You dont simply get over anxiety once and for all with a few quick tricks. Instead, anxiety management will be crucial, and learning resilience is the key to success here.

In this post, were going to discuss exactly what I mean by resilience and why its so crucial in anxiety management.

What I Mean By Resilience

When working with clients, I put a big focus on resilience for anxiety management.

Resilience is the ability to go through difficult and challenging times and coming out strong on the other side. It comes down to being adaptable, learning how to face new challenges as theyre presented to you. Life isnt static, after all. New struggles, fears, and anxiety-inducing events will pop up and continually emerge overtime.

Heres why resilience is so important for anxiety management

Anxiety Isnt An Isolated Incident

Lets talk hypotheticals for a minute.

Lets say you make an appointment with a counselor to discuss the anxiety youre having about whether or not youre ready to have a baby. The counselor helps you through this, and then youre no longer anxious about this specific fear. You know you want a bouncing bundle of joy of your own.

Then, however, you realize that youre anxious about the pregnancy. What if something goes wrong?

Then you have a happy, healthy baby. Youre anxious that they could get sick, or that they arent developing fast enough, or that you wont be a good mother.

If anxiety impacts one area of your life, it can (and often does) easily spread to others. What may first present itself as worrying about test performance in high school can easily manifest later in your work, marriage, parenting, and anything else it can touch.

This is because anxiety is not an isolated incident. Its not like a phobia, which is singular and highly specific. You arent afraid of spiders, and you just dont like seeing one scurry across your house.

Anxiety is much more generalized, and it will impact multiple areas of your life if not managed well. Resilience allows you to learn the tools you need to overcome anxiety in any way it manifests instead of just addressing singular challenges head on and one at a time.

Resilience Tackles The Underlying Causes of Anxiety

One tell-tale sign of anxiety that many people experience is being plagued by always-present what if thoughts that may never come to fruition.

If youre trying to manage your anxiety on your own, you may be familiar with this. You may have also tried to logic your way out of the problem.

Im staying home, you might think. So, Im unlikely to catch this coronavirus and Ill probably be okay.

This is logical, and it allows you to address fears one by one.

Sometimes, though, tackling individual anxiety issues by over-reasoning may actually feed into the problem. This is particularly likely to be the case for those with high-functioning, high-achieving anxiety.

When this happens, your well-being suffers, and you can easily find yourself overwhelmed and struggling to make even relatively simple decisions.

By learning how to become truly resilient, youll be able to address anxious tendencies. And thought patterns as a whole instead of giving in to individual worries. Youre addressing the root cause of the problem instead of swatting away a single symptom over and over.

Resilient People Are More Able to Adapt Appropriately

In many cases, people who experience anxiety may lack resilience that prevents them from adapting to new situations in healthy, productive ways.

Lets look at an example. Think about a young child who is dead set on receiving a specific doll for Christmas. Maybe she gets almost what she wants, but the doll has brown hair instead of blonde. And is wearing a blue skirt instead of a pink one. The child has a meltdown because its not exactly what she wanted.

When were anxious, we can sometimes get stuck in a this is how its supposed to be rut. Which can only fuel more anxiety and prevent us from adapting to new situations around us. This doesnt do anyone any good.

Resilience will help you overcome this. Few things in life work out exactly how we might have hoped or planned. Having the resilience to adapt without becoming overly reactive or falling immobile is important. It gives you a skill set that can help you be more confident moving forward, which can also help prevent you from making poor decisions rooted in anxiety, too.

Conclusion

Resilience is an important life skill that everyone should have and actively develop, and its a crucial part of anxiety management.

Too many stressors and anxieties all at once otherwise end up piling on, leaving you feeling incredibly overwhelmed and stuck. This can cause us to make poor decisions that hurt us instead of helping us, continuing a downward spiral into heightened anxiety.

As you become more resilient, youll be able to improve your decision making while better managing the anxiety. This will give you the tools you need to get through tough times and unexpected challenges with grace (and with your well-being intact!).

Remember that the best time to build resilience is right now. You dont want to wait for this.

Building resilience and learning how to more effectively manage anxiety and stress is a key part of what we do here at Twanna Carter Professional & Personal Coaching LLC. We dont offer a few quick fixes that dont actually work; we assess and develop personal resilience that will be essential for you long-term, because long-term anxiety management should always be the goal.

Ready to start building resilience for improved and effective anxiety management? Learn more about our program here!