Anxiety: A Modern Plague

Reducing anxiety helps us live joyfully and fully.
by Alison Bonds Shapiro, M.B.A. in Healing Into Possibility
Originally published online by Psychology Today

Anxiety is one of our modern plagues. Its effects are visible everywhere, interfering with our happiness and our abilitiy to live productively. Anxiety limits our connections with other people, saps our energy, reduces our focus and our skillfulness and undermines our health.  Most of us experience significant anxiety at one point or another, some of us more often than others. Recently several people have asked me questions about the ongoing anxiety that they experience post injury. Although anxiety arises from the same major causes regardless of the particulars of our circumstances, looking at the anxiety that develops in response to illness and injury can make these causes of anxiety easier to see for all of us.

The first and most obvious cause of anxiety is uncertainty. We understand our world by the way we move in it, by the way people respond to us and how we can affect things around us. Any significant change that shakes the way we know our world and our place within it, like a natural disaster, the loss of a job, a death or a major change in our physical wellbeing, disrupts our sense of what is real. "This (whatever it is) is not happening to me!"
Read the original article...