Anxiety Has a Good Side Too!

Most of us these days take anxiety as negative brain thought, which potentially damages our wellbeing. But here is a catch anxiety became part of our subconscious brain for a reason. Our elders had to struggle and fight for survival pretty much each and every moment. They were anxious and attentive most of the time to fight the potential predators.

When we are relaxed and in our comfort zone for most parts of our life, we sort of get behind in the race of life. Those with higher anxiety levels win the race. It’s Okay to be anxious to a certain level, it prepares us to fight the potential danger and keeps us in the race. When we are anxious, our brain is alert at most, it tries to solve problems quickly. Our anxiety can help us achieve our desired goal if we use it to our leverage.

When students approach their term exam, their anxiety grows to higher level. When they touch the peak of their anxiety, they study more and their concentration level increases. This is just because they want to compete with their peers and want to be in the race. One study has found that the average student who couldn’t understand a difficult problem in normal routine classes when they approached their exams and were exposed to the same problem again in their revisions prior to the exam, their probability of understanding the same problem rose significantly. Their attention span grew dramatically, which helped them understand the problems they couldn’t grasp in their classes.

In the era of a global pandemic our anxiety is pointing us towards a change of lifestyle. It is telling us that something is not right out there. Anxiety becomes a problem when it touches its extreme, so that it hinders us from performing our day to day task. Even the extreme form can divert our attention from self care and can be destructive.The famous Danish philosopher Soren Keirgaard once said that who ever learns to be anxious in right way, he learn the ultimate way.

Anxiety is not as clear as I’ve discussed it so for. Sometime times it’s slow, other times it’s fast. It’s a confusing state of mind. Perhaps its just because life is challenging, it’s not easy. Our subconscious persistently keeps wandering about our future and our surroundings. It wants to make sense of its surroundings and and future events. Once it feel that something is not right about the environment or about the future, our subconscious mind gets anxious. It becomes attentive and tries to solve any potential problem. That’s why sometime sitting alone we feel sad and anxious for no reason, our subconscious is active at that time guessing about the future and the immediate surroundings.

If we understand the motive behind our anxious mind, we can use the power of anxiety to our advantage. Our brain has the power to solve most of our daily life problems, that’s how our ancestors survived. There were many species bigger in size than homosepiends but their anxious brain was not as active as ours. We don’t see those species anymore , they have become extinct. They didn’t have the power to sense the immediate danger, thus they failed to adopt the new living conditions. Humans have tremendous advantage over any other species on the planet, perhaps that’s why we carry such a large anxious brain.