Dancing Into The Minds
Written by Andi Bazaar | Aug. 5, 2022
“Emotions are really necessary to deal with, don’t just ignore what is making you feel anxious address the root. God doesn’t just ask us to cast our cares onto Him for the sake of it, anxiety often spawns sickness and God is trying to protect you.”
Research has shown that anxiety can cause constipation, diarrhea, irritable bowel syndrome and can be linked to arthritis. When we refuse to give God our cares we open ourselves upto chronic stress and anxiety which research shows can trigger heartburn, acid reflux plus inflammation.
Casting our cares actually isn’t an option or a nice thing to do, it’s a benevolent command. Our mental health is important to Him and high priority, not only because He loves us but also because He desires to be glorified through your life as the prince of peace.
LET’S TALK ABOUT ANXIETY
I’ve basically stopped tweeting, Instagramming everything for the last several months. It finally hit me today that its because my anxiety is winning more often than not.
Now the thing is, the anxiety isn't always overwhelming but it is always there. Every day, every minute. There are days where I can overcome, push through, act "normal" as if nothing is wrong. Then there are days like today where, I just want to stop everything and shut down
I think its important to recognize that the anxiety is there even when its completely unreasonable in nature, it doesn't change the fact that you feel that anxiousness in the moment. Burying those feels ain't it chief because they will come back with fury.
Another thing I've noticed for me, its often difficult to formulate the words of why you feel the anxiety is as bad as it is. I mean, you can point to why the anxiety is there but why its as bad as it is for me difficult to explain.
Whats worse is the guilt associated with having anxiety over things you deem as "not important." I ask myself all the time: "why are you worried about this stupid thing when X,Y,Z person is worried about something so much more important than your dumb thing"
Someone who suffers from anxiety knows exactly what I mean, we are complete assholes to ourselves and often being the harshest of harshest critics x100. We are hardest on ourselves but would never be that critical of anyone else.
I say all this because it just dawned on me that, that is why I just haven't the desire to make any content. My anxiety is simply just winning right now. I'm recognizing it, working through it and will prevail over it.
Look, if you're a person that suffers from anxiety you're not alone. Talk to someone, get some help. I promise you it will get better (these are the things that I have to keep reminding myself too). As for when i'll make content again? Honestly, who knows and thats ok too.
LET’S TALK ABOUT PERFECTIONISM
It can be destructive and add even more to our existing depression and anxiety, it also impacts our self-esteem because perfection is a standard that cannot be achieved and therefore and we may feel in a constant state of failure.
"Perfectionism," is defined as the need to be perfect and feel that there is a perfection status that we can achieve, it can become a goal for everything we do from work, to our social life and relationships. We may try to control or tweak things constantly to achieve it.
Just as with most issues related to mental health, it has its roots in our childhood. We live in a culture that is highly comparative, we grew up listening to us being compared to others when it came to school, and how to be a “good” kid. These “others” were the perfection.
Of course, we didn’t realize at that age that those other kids our parents idealized were probably going through the same thing in their own households and they are also compared to others, furthermore validation and approval were sparse from caregivers.
For example, let’s say we achieve a goal of cleaning the house but we forget one spot or even one room. Rather than being validated for doing 90% of the work well which is amazing for a kid, we will be yelled at or punished for the 10% we may have overlooked.
It teaches us that unless something is done perfectly, it is not worth doing because it will lead to nothing but internal misery and external punishment. As adults, that can translate as debilitating fear to try anything new because we can’t do it perfectly.
Why pick up an instrument, try a new hobby, learn a language or sport if we won’t be able to do it perfectly. It is just going to add more stress to our life so the status quo is better than exploring our environment, which also triggers us because we feel we are stagnating.
When it comes to our relationships, we may feel lonely because our friends or partners don’t understand that aspect. They don’t want to improve with us or makes certain changes that can lead to that utopia of perfection.
We may overcontrol our environment such as our house or room, we may spend too much time and energy obsessing about how we are going to proceed for even the most mundane tasks in a perfect manner which takes more internal resources and stress than simply doing the activity.
When it comes to our mental health recovery, we may feel that anything short of a quick and miraculous recovery means we are failures and that we need to have complete control of our minds which is impossible no matter how long we go to therapy for.
The important thing we need to remember to start our recovery is to realize that perfection doesn’t exist even when our parents were defining that “perfection,” it was subjective and changed based on their mood and the situation and they couldn’t even stick to one version.
Furthermore, even if it were to exist there is no happiness or validation on the other side. We are chasing something that isn’t result based, the fact that we didn’t receive unconditional love or validation had nothing to do with perfection and isn’t our fault.
Putting the responsibility for that low self-esteem where it lies helps us realize that it was never about achievements or perfection but rather about caregivers who themselves never learned how to love and transferred their own anxieties and traumas onto us.
We can also start adopting a technique of anti-perfection. For example, when we journal let’s make spelling errors on purpose or not stick to the line on purpose. It is going to help us realize that it doesn’t take away from the process of journaling or content of our journal.
It may trigger some anxiety at first because our brain is convinced through conditioning that going against that “perfection” leads to bad outcomes, but the more we make small errors on purpose the more our brain rewires itself to think of it as inconsequential.
Finally, it is important to go to therapy and have someone who can listen and help us dive into this process emotionally. For individuals with perfectionism, we may go to therapy with 50 pages of notes and try to solve it all intellectually.
However, that doesn’t work and our therapist will encourage us to set those aside and talk about it from an emotional standpoint in order to make sense of those experiences and allow for some positive changes to happen.
I hope that this article on perfectionism makes sense, if you experience it please know that there are ways out even if it takes a little time. After all, we are trying to undo decades of conditioning.
to be continued…
