Feeling anxious? Don’t fight it, expert says – embrace anxiety and harness its power to become more productive and build resilience
- Rather than letting anxiety consume you, it is better to identify and manage the threat that’s causing it, and channel it into something that works for you
- Breathe deeply to keep calm, says a neuroscientist, and exercise to give your brain a ‘bubble bath’. When anxious, ask yourself ‘What can I learn from it?’
Anxiety is no stranger to us as we enter the third year of the coronavirus pandemic. We all know the symptoms – a tightness in the chest, the knot in the stomach, a restless night spent tossing and turning in bed.
The feeling is surely the enemy to our well-being, right?
Wrong, says Dr Wendy Suzuki, a US professor of neural science and psychology at New York University, who explains the research behind her assertion in her book Good Anxiety: Harnessing the Power of the Most Misunderstood Emotion.
Suzuki acknowledges that anxiety is meant to be unpleasant, and in the debilitating extreme that she calls “bad anxiety”, it can be destructive and require medical intervention.
But learning to harness the brain activation underlying general anxiety can be significantly more valuable than having no anxiety at all – and can unlock superpowers, she says.