When is anxiety positive? What are its most prominent benefits?

Feeling anxious may just be a warning sign you need to increase awareness of your current situation (Pixels)

Many people consider it an unpleasant feeling. Your palms become sweaty, your heart beats rapidly, you may feel abdominal cramps or some stomach upset, you may suffer from insomnia and an inability to sleep, and your mind may lose the ability to think logically. You are accompanied by the feeling that there is imminent danger, which creates A general feeling of unease sweeps over you. This is anxiety.

It is logical that you see it as a negative feeling, and try to stay away from it and avoid it with all your might, and even search for ways and steps that enable you to confront it and get rid of it.

But in fact, anxiety has many benefits that may change your perspective on it, and make you allow yourself to feel some anxiety.

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Some people prefer to feel anxious

Some scientific studies attribute some people's keenness to develop their feelings of anxiety to its ability to enhance cognitive performance and its ability to make some people feel comfortable.

On the other hand, anxiety may not be related to any benefit or benefit for some.

But some of them relate to anxiety simply because it has become a “familiar” feeling, which was observed by psychology researcher Brett Ford from the University of Denver in the United States of America through a questionnaire in which 139 university students participated, to measure the feelings that people tend to feel most of the time.

After a while, Ford returned to asking people who tend to feel constant anxiety what feeling they would like to experience?

They responded that they wanted to feel “anxious.”

Neuroscientist Kent Berridge from the University of Michigan explains - to the American magazine "Newsweek" - that the desire to feel a certain feeling is completely different from enjoying this feeling, as "desire" is generated by a group of neurotransmitters, completely different from the neurotransmitters that generate the feeling of "enjoyment." ".

The need to feel anxious may be largely the result of a state of “anxiety addiction,” which in turn generates a desire to feel anxious regardless of whether this feeling is pleasant or not.

Some people resort to enhancing their feelings of anxiety because it increases the pace of their cognitive performance (Bixaby)

Advantages of "worry"

Neuroscientist and author of “Good Anxiety,” Dr. Wendy Suzuki, told the New York Times that “feelings of anxiety and stress response are essential to protect us,” noting that managing anxiety and stress and dealing with these types of feelings effectively may be more beneficial than getting rid of them. or avoid them completely.

Of course, what is meant here is pathological anxiety, as anxiety disorders are classified as serious mental illnesses, and anxiety disorder is characterized by a great anxiety or feeling of fear that does not disappear.

But what is meant here is natural anxiety, the most prominent advantage of which is that it makes you smarter, as it makes you resort to critical thinking and analysis, to try to get to the bottom of things and not be satisfied with the apparent.

Concern also prevents excessive naive optimism simply by monitoring some initial positive indicators.

Anxiety may make you realize a truth that is difficult to realize when you have positive feelings. For example, you may notice that you repeatedly feel anxious about an idea or situation. Anxiety here is like an alarm system. It is likely that your mind and body are trying to tell you that there is something that requires attention and treatment.

For its part, the Very Well Made website explains that feeling anxious may just be a warning sign that you need to increase awareness of your current situation and make some necessary changes in your life.

For example, it may be a symptom that helps you act quickly to avoid an accident while driving a car, or prevents you from entering an unsafe place or circumstance, or it may be a warning sign that your relationship has reached a dead end, or that the stress of your job is threatening your mental health.

Anxiety may be a warning sign that your relationship is no longer working or that your job is stressful and threatening to your mental health (Shutterstock)

How do you deal with anxiety?

While Ellen Hendricksen, a clinical psychologist in Boston and author of How to Be Yourself: Master Your Inner Criticism and Overcome Social Anxiety, explains that a certain degree of anxiety can help with caution, organization, and anticipating obstacles.

But when people refuse to feel anxiety and work to confront it as soon as it appears or try to avoid feeling it in the first place, in this case they turn into someone who works to silence a fire alarm siren, because its sound is annoying, without realizing that this siren indicates the presence of a fire. It calls for extinguishing rather than focusing on the nuisance it creates.

What is meant here is the need to think about the roots of things, try to reach the messages that anxiety sends, and determine the adjustments that you may need to make in your life.

Anxiety also helps in getting to know oneself in a better and deeper way, as it is the basic gateway to finding and defining the deepest values.

For example, you may feel anxious when you see someone lying, hurting another person with negative words, or bullying them. This feeling of discomfort resulting from seeing such behavior may act as a vital radar that shows you what is right from wrong, and shows us what behaviors and ethics we accept. And those we reject, this increases our ability to distinguish our inner selves and develop our self-awareness.

Yerkes-Dodson law

According to the Yerkes-Dodson Law - a theory that originated in the early twentieth century and was formulated through experiments on rats - increasing amounts of cognitive arousal, or feelings of anxiety and tension, can improve performance, but only to a certain extent.

Represented by a mountain-shaped curve, the theory shows that after the curve reaches its peak, higher levels of stress lead to decreased performance.

While a Psychology Today report indicates that anxiety can make you more able to feel happy, this is because anticipating the worst scenarios makes us feel happy when none of these negative scenarios that we expected happen.

Anxiety can make you more able to feel happy (Shutterstock)

Psychology Today also notes that anxious people tend to draw negative conclusions in ambiguous situations.

For example, if an anxious person is trying to turn on the computer, and finds that it is not working, the first thing that will come to mind in this case is that the device has been damaged, perhaps he will not think that the battery is likely dead and just needs to be recharged!

This may make him feel relieved and happy when he discovers that the “disaster” he imagined would not happen.

The person may have an alternative plan to deal with it in the event that the computer is actually damaged, which is something that may not occur to an optimistic person.

Another benefit of anxiety is that it may enhance your social relationships, because people who experience anxiety may become more sympathetic and understanding of the problems and negative feelings that those around them face.

Source: Al Jazeera + websites