Using Anxiety to Your Advantage

Posted on July 23, 2020 by Mason Miller, One of Thousands of Health and Fitness Coaches on Noomii.

Every single person deals with anxiety. For some people, even thinking about the word “anxiety” gives them anxiety. We all know what it feels like: a tightness in your chest, the feeling of space closing in, a surge of energy swelling in our bodies. We get shaky, jittery, and start to fidget in one way or another. Anxiety has a very negative connotation, which it has rightfully earned by leading to things like depression and other mental disorders. But what if I told you anxiety is actually a powerful tool evolved over thousands of years for us to become borderline superhuman? It’s true! Anxiety and the feelings associated with it are caused by a huge dump of adrenaline. Adrenaline has the effect of narrowing our focus, increasing our energy efficiency, and improving muscle contractions. This narrowed focus allows us to notice and see smaller details, the increased energy efficiency diverts blood flow away from unnecessary bodily functions like digestion to give more energy to your muscles, and the improved muscle contractions gives us more strength and power. These qualities automatically occur when we experience anxiety, but because we try to push it down rather than embrace it, we create the usual shakiness and fidgeting rather than the superhuman effects we could be obtaining. The energy needs to go somewhere, and when resisted against, this creates the negative effects we commonly see and call “performance anxiety” which then creates the bad experiences we have all lived through. Rather than trying to hide anxiety or ignore it, we need to start embracing it. In its truest form, anxiety is a sort of superpower that enable us to do things above and beyond what we can normally do. The next time you feel anxiety, welcome it. You have just been transformed into a superhuman.