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Anxiety: “The Gatekeeper to Hell”…
Last week, I had a conversation with someone who was clearly anxious about an impending event. The outcome could have dire consequences, if things didn’t go his way. He admitted that he hadn’t slept for nights, and could do nothing but think about the potential negative outcomes. His became a world on the brink, where anxiety reigns supreme, and the entry point to that nefarious place we call hell, is but a fine line. Anxiety – “The Gatekeeper to Hell” – was not knocking this time, but pounding on this soul’s door.
Ancient Greek author Aesop (620 BC-560 BC) wrote that “a crust eaten in peace is better than a banquet partaken in anxiety.” It seems that the ancients knew a thing or two about what it means when anxiety engulfs, and who of us hasn’t been there, right? We’ve all had our times when we’ve felt strangled by worry and apprehension, and our thoughts, as if wrapped in a fog, couldn’t escape to see the clear of day. For when anxiety takes hold, it certainly does a number.
But is anxiety necessarily bad? Well that depends. Anxiety, like euphoria, is energy, but its energy in the opposite direction. Instead of elation and well-being, which euphoria brings, anxiety breeds concern, fret and worry. Its physical effects can cripple, and can cause any number of disorders: from lack of appetite to overeating, from insomnia to headaches, from hopelessness to depression. But something else it can do provided we channel the energy accordingly: it can spark an unimaginable amount of creativity (see Creativity: Life’s Most Enduring Reward…) For it’s in those times, when everything appears lost, that the mind often puts to work, and dwells without end, on every possible solution to the problem that confronts.
History shows that some of the most brilliant military victories happened when all appeared lost. Anxiety was the impetus to fight on. If the alternative was defeat, then why not fight a gallant end? And sometimes that gallant end wrested victory from the dust of defeat. The creativity of the anxious overcame the complacency of the confident.
Likewise, in our own lives, we must not allow anxiety to overwhelm, but use it to our benefit. We must, as best we can, take stock of the situation, and calmly prepare for whatever comes our way. And if anxiety be the catalyst that drives us onward, then so be it. It’s much better to take action with anxiety propelling us forward than go to our demise peacefully doing nothing.
So the next time that ‘Gatekeeper to Hell’ comes a calling, let’s flip it over. Let’s turn a negative into a positive, and make anxiety go to work for us like we never have before…
For more, check out The C.A.T. Principle: Change, Action, Trust – Words to Live By, a Global Ebook Awards GOLD Winner for Best Self-Help Non-Fiction Ebook of 2014, available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble. See the latest Amazon reviews here. Now revised and expanded, and once again nominated for the Best Self-Help Non-Fiction Ebook of the 2015 Global Ebook Awards!
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A 2014 Global Ebook Awards GOLD Winner for Best Non-fiction Self-help Ebook.
A 2015 Global Ebook Awards Nominee for Best Self-Help Non-Fiction Ebook