I was recently asked an important question in a livestream, and it’s one that I am regularly asked about. “How do you deal with anxiety?”
I answered the question earnestly, and my response is below:
How do you deal with anxiety?
It is a very good question and it begs to acknowledge that anxiety exists, but not on the same scales for everyone. So I want to talk about something I talk about regularly.
Peace, balance and harmony. Your mind, your body, and your spirit.
When it comes to anxiety - let us try to define the term. What is anxiety? Anxiety is a state of being that is a constant state of worry. Anxiety is a type of fear. It’s the feeling that “I am so consumed by what is likely to happen that I am unable to operate to my maximum potential, to my fullest.”
Another way to think about anxiety is: “I am so consumed with pressure by what I'm experiencing, I have no longer found it inside myself to face it, to deal with it. I am now limited, I am now stunted. I'm no longer growing.”
Anxiety to me is synonymous with a stunting of sorts. And it's important to note I don't think anxiety needs to exist so abundantly, so regularly.
The anxiety that most people carry with them today, I think is unnecessary and I think it's a manifestation of poor practices.
So, how do I deal with anxiety? I practice. This means anxiety is not really a part of my life. By focusing my mind on peace, I'm able to circumvent where I think lots of people have placed worry and fostered anxiety. When you think about how the brain works and how the body works, things are in repetition, right?
The chemical practices create what we call consistency. You can alter your state of mind and your state of being using practices which elicit thoughts that go into your body and change your chemical composition. I talk a lot about peace and how it's tied to learning lessons, because the more lessons we have, the more we're able to draw from in that moment so that we can battle the anxiety that may exist.
If you are not consumed with anxiety or you're wondering how someone else should deal with anxiety, have a conversation with them and find out where they are not learning, because that's what's happening. They're not learning lessons so that they are able to build up their confidence to keep moving forward.
I literally just worked on a class on this. Sign up for our newsletter. The link is in my bio. We're releasing the class a week from today. (est launch date August 9th) It's called Empowerment and self esteem. (Sign up here)
In the “Empowerment and Self Esteem Class”, I talk about self-confidence, self-respect, self-esteem, where all these things come together to mean different things, and how they all stack up. I think right now, in today's time, there's a lot of low self confidence. I think right now, there's a lot of low self esteem, and I think right now there's a lot of low self respect. And because of that, I think that there is an abundance of anxiety and disarray moving around the place. And I think far too many people aren't addressing those things as the root of how to eliminate anxiety.
Instead, we're providing means to coddle or coat or in some ways just pacify the anxiety. I would like to eliminate it. I don't think it needs to exist. I'd like to replace it with love, courage, and understanding, ingenuity, thoughtfulness. But if we keep replacing it with more anxiety and worry and then somehow saying we need to be sensitive to the anxiety and worry all the time, well, then every one of us is just coddling each other and we're never going to grow. We're all just spreading weakness in the strangest of ways. And I say weakness because, truly, to decide not to face a challenge, to decide not to make growth a priority, is to make yourself stunted.
And to me, what does it mean to be weak? It means that something can easily snap you, and that's what you're doing if you're not making your vine stronger, right? You're making your vine thinner, weaker, and easily snappable. Unfortunately, that's where a lot of people stand, with so much anxiety. Now, people get overly worried when somebody's late or they haven't heard from someone on their our cell phone, and now it's like, oh, man, the heartbeat's racing. This type of thinking is going through the roof. “I can't do it,” people think in these moments.
But they have no peace. So if you got a ton of anxiety, focus on your peace.
Fear is a tool. So if you are one of those people that's like, “Is Garden Marcus calling me weak?” No, no, that's not the point. Fear is a tool, right? Do not let it become a trap. If you have let yourselves become trapped by your fears, then yes, in the nature of strength and weakness, you are are not strengthening yourself. That is how nature works. Either you are working to strengthen or you are likely enabling yourself to weaken. Think about that.
Without constant effort, you allow an infestation to come in. You got to be taking care of yourself and making sure you're raising your vibration and raising your thought process.
Next week, I’m launching an online school for personal growth & development. I’ll offer on-demand classes & courses, live workshops, and virtual coaching. If you’d like to stay in the loop and access an exclusive discount to use during the launch, sign up for my company newsletter & we’ll send it to your inbox.
If you’re interested in tuning into a livestream, I am currently streaming M-F on Instagram & TikTok beginning sometime between 8 and 9am CT.
IG: garden_marcus
TikTok: gardenmarcus
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