This is a great creative exercise to help you move from a place of overwhelm, when anxiety feels like your entire being, to a place of clarity, where anxiety has reason, shape, and purpose.
Anxiety tends to want to free float around our mind and body, antagonizing and taunting us, shaking us until we become paralyzed with fear. We can’t move because we are afraid. We are afraid because we can’t move. It’s a never ending cycle.
We feel powerless and unable to gain control over our own lives. It’s almost like having an unruly and dangerous animal living inside of us; biting, growling, and clawing until we give in to its demands.
So how do we gain our control back? How do we become unstuck from this perpetual cycle of fear and dread?
Though the overall management of anxiety can be a long process, you can begin your healing in this very moment in a very simple way. Start looking at your anxiety as fear, with purpose. When we just talk about anxiety it can be overwhelming but when you look at what anxiety really is…it is fear, concern, and worry, over very tangible and real things. We get stuck when we don’t see the tangible and let our entire being get swallowed up.
Identify, or more simply put, name your anxiety. It is very simple: by giving our anxiety a name and definition we can begin to empower ourselves to take back control and keep it at bay. In other words, you can’t teach the anxiety creature to sit, stay, and lie down until the beast knows its name, and who is really in control.
The next time you find yourself in a state of anxiety, just pause for a few moments and take some time to see your fear and worry for what it really is. Try finding a name for it. Bring it to life. Give it an identity, a state a mind, a soul, a voice, an opinion. Close your eyes and create an image. Draw it out or write a story about it. Externalize it from your being and give it that tangible quality it lost. It can be animal, vegetable, mineral, human, robot, or just a basic concept or idea. What this does is allow you to see it as a separate part of your being, see it for what it really is, because when we can do this, we take a step closer to working through it rather then getting swallowed up.