Its insane to me how easy it is for anxiety to seep in.
Background: I noticed that I was no longer friends with a classmate on Facebook and I couldn't remember if I un-friended her or if she un-friended me. This is silly already, but there's a point in here somewhere. So I began to wonder why someone would de-friend me (BECAUSE its life-threatening, right?) and then came to the conclusion that I had offended this person in some way. My first thought was it was likely a religious comment, because as much as I try not to offend, I have never had anything very positive to say about the South or their infatuation with putting Jesus into everything. My distaste for the tendency to put Christianity on this pedestal and not acknowledge that other people have different beliefs makes me crazy(350 million Buddhists and 1.6 Billion Muslims must be mistaken)*. I'm generalizing the views of the entire South, which always makes for an effective argument (obviously) but there it is. I'm constantly worried that I am going to offend someone and I need to knock it off, because then I get thrown into this whirlwind of anxiety that then leads to more anxiety about bigger, more important things. Not only that but when it stems from my thoughts on religion there is the inevitable guilt that comes along with it (and I wasn't even raised Catholic). The beautiful parts of religion (any religion) always get stepped on or misinterpreted to hurt people. My hippie tendency to ask the question, "Can't we all just get along?" exposes its little, naive head.
Unfortunately that was a very small piece of my thought process that led me here.
I then start worrying about classes, Comps, graduating, jobs, friends, relationships, you name it I thought about it and decided I needed to figure out a way to FIX EVERYTHING! After minutes of rushing thoughts about visiting old friends, studying instead of sleeping and applying to jobs RIGHT NOW I came back to reality. That's when I say, Shannon shut up, it's after 10 pm on a Sunday, what are you going to do about it tonight? Nothing. As much as I want to solve all of my potential problems, I need to consider that these are not even really problems. My life is great, the people I love know that I love them and miss them and I'm usually pretty intelligent so I will figure all of the school stuff out. I consider being more intentional about connecting with people but also need to remember that it is a two way street.
So all-in-all fifteen minutes or so worrying about everything then talking myself back to a normal level of worry/doubt/anxiety is much better than it ever was. So the next time I go from 0-60 in .002 seconds flat I need to remember the following:
-Where is this worry coming from?
-Am I being ridiculous?
-How is this remedied without creating more anxiety?
-Where does the importance of this rate on a scale of feeling chilly to being set on fire?
-Get the eff off of Facebook and focus on something more important-like anything else.
List making is fun and relatively effective. Give it a shot sometime. Maybe use a better scale for level of importance that is suited to your needs. You may hate feeling chilly. Most of the time I state out loud something about chilly willy, laugh and grab a hoodie, so its pretty minor for me.
*Those stats are from wikipedia so maybe don't run off and cite them as credible just yet.
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