I’m Not Anxious, I’m Excited

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Wine Recommendation from this Episode: Lajota Vineyard 2014 Merlot

Some stuff came up for me on my vacation surrounding anxiety. We are back from Maui and I started to have some serious anxiety come up during our trip. I am not sure if it’s getting worse as I am getting older, or it’s all that is going on in the world, but it’s at a high level for me right now.

During this trip I took a social media and contact break, I turned off all my notifications and hid the icons. This made me so hyper aware of how many times I picked up my phone and even gave me FOMO because I was so concerned with what was going on without me. This is coming home with me, though, I really want to change my habits and change the way I interact with my socials. I can’t control the content I see, and it’s possible the things coming up are creating another source of fear and anxiety for me, that was also prevalent on my vacation.

Some anxiety came up on our vacation. It was coming up out of nowhere in some ways. I was getting physical symptoms like sweaty palms and nervous stomach, which would even cause more fear for me. On night one, I started getting anxious about the water and the way it was making me feel and being in the waves. The anxiety was so fierce that It started to restrict my feelings and desire to go to the beach during our trip.

When I brought my concerns up to Dustin, he challenged my feelings by saying, “Don’t look at this as anxiety, look at it as excitement, you’re excited to go into the water”. I found this really interesting and started swapping this word surrounding statements of fear or anxiety I have in a variety of scenarios. I am excited to be in the water, I am excited about what people think of me. This made a lot of sense to me and I really feel like this mindset is going to work, even if it’s going to take practice and effort.

I plan on seeing a therapist and I feel like it’s a really healthy thing to do, in order to get to the deeper issues. However, I feel like breath work and a mindset shift can really be the start of changing my anxiety and not looking at it as fear. In my research, I found that fear and anxiety are really the same thing. Fear is a feeling in response to a real thing happening, and anxiety is the same feeling in response to imagination.

I am not afraid, I am not anxious… I am excited. I really can’t wait to speak more on this and on the effect of changing my social media habits. If you really relate to what I shared today, or it resonated with you, and you want to reach out, I’d love to hear from you! Just email [email protected], you’re not alone.