What’s the point of anxiety anyway? You might be wondering why nature would give you these anxiety symptoms. Well, the job of the subconscious mind is to keep you safe and out of danger and one way it tries to do that is through anxiety.
Relax and I’ll Tell You A Story
Just imagine he’s walking through the forest, he’s been out all day and he’s feeling a bit lost. It’s going to be dark soon, there may be just another hour of light left and he doesn’t have any camping equipment. He doesn’t have much water left, he doesn’t have anything to eat.
His ankle is beginning to swell up. He thinks maybe he might have twisted it slightly, he’s developing a little bit of a limp.
He can hear the sound of birds all around him and there’s the smell of pine trees in the air. The nice, familiar sounds and smells are helping him relax a little bit, they are making him calm down slightly as he’s limping
It doesn’t that much faith that he’s going in the right direction, but he hopes he will be out of this forest soon. He must nearly be there by now. He’s getting worried, he’s getting more and more worried. More and more concerned. He’s heard the bears in this area can be really aggressive and nocturnal. So he’s limping along and those feelings in his stomach are increasing, it’s getting tied up in knots.
Then he hears a big roar coming from behind him. He turns around and he sees this great big bear standing on its hind legs, maybe eight feet tall. At this point his body releases all kinds of hormones like adrenaline and cortisol and these make his heart rate go up so that it is blood can pump around his body more efficiently and he’s going to need that blood going into his legs carrying all that oxygen into his legs muscles so that he can run and that ankle that was bothering him, one of the things that adrenaline does is reduce swelling. The reduced swelling and the laser-like focus to get away from that bear mean the pain diminishes he has forgotten about that ankle now.
With that reduced swelling he can start to run like he’s never run before and his hands are going to become sweaty and it’s thought that the reason for sweaty hands is because the sweat makes them a little bit sticky and that it makes it easier to climb trees, climbing a tree is probably going to be a good idea. It down on all fours now chasing him through the forest.
So that a few of the benefits of anxiety, anxiety is a defence mechanism it’s your subconscious minds way of keeping you safe.
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