Top Ten Tips: Anxiety Tip #8 - Validating your Anxiety

There's a been a bit of a fashion in recent years of encouraging people to reduce, minimise and eradicate their anxiety or, worse - 'control' it. Poor anxiety is what I say! There certainly is a group of emotions that always get left out of the party: jealousy, anger, shame and hurt to name a few others. My opinion is that ALL emotions have an important role to play in our lives, no matter how uncomfortable or 'ugly' they may seem, and anxiety is one of them.

In my most recent video I share my tips on how to use your anxiety constructively. After all, anxiety is one of our oldest 'feelings', and it's got its very own job to do: to keep us safe and to keep us alive.

Think of it this way: all buildings should have a fire alarm system - smoke detectors, fire exits, emergency lighting, sprinklers. If the smoke alarm went off in your own home, you wouldn't just ignore it; you'd check it out, even if it's just been set off my some burnt toast. We usually have great respect for fire alarms because we understand the danger of ignoring them.

Your body has the same system. It has a mechanism to detect threats and act defensively against those threats. Sometimes it's accurate; sometimes it isn't. Either way, we owe that life-saving system the respect to listen to it long enough to determine if it's just burnt toast, or if it's a real fire.