Either way, whether your anxiety is self-generated or externally-generated or both, your brain still needs to sound the alarm – and thank goodness it does! It’s essentially telling you: ‘Warning, something is sabotaging or might sabotage your goals, health, happiness and survival – find it, fix it!’ to which your mental response should be, ‘Gee, thanks, I’m on it!

Anxiety is just our brain’s way of trying to keep us alive andwell; it is simply, and fortunately, one of our many in-built survivalmechanisms. Just as we feel pain when we burn our skin whichtells us to move away from the cause of the pain, we experienceanxiety when the brain perceives a threat to our well-being and istelling us to prevent or extinguish the threat/danger.

Anxiety is our friend, not our enemy. Even when anxiety is severe and out of control, it’s stillour friend because it’s telling us something seriously needsaddressing in order for us to survive and thrive, even if that severeanxiety is a sign that our alerting system is unnecessarily workingovertime or even ‘malfunctioning’ of sorts.

Anxiety is just our brain’s way of trying to keep us alive and well; it is simply, and fortunately, one of our many in-built survival mechanisms. Just as we feel pain when we burn our skin which tells us to move away from the cause of the pain, we experience anxiety when the brain perceives a threat to our well-being and is telling us to prevent or extinguish the threat/danger.

Don’t choose to live with anxiety any more than you would choose to live with a bleeding arm.

Anxiety is not intended for us to live with it. You use anxiety to your advantage to protect your mental and physical well-being and survival from a threat or danger.

Rumination doesn’t solve anything, reflection and introspection can solve all.

It’s weird how much just one sentence uttered to yourself about the thing that you are doing, as you are doing it, can noticeably alter your behaviour right there and then. Just start watching how your thoughts play out.

Don’t let some people’s blase attitude towards human relationships in the modern world fool you into thinking that humans are dispensable, that family and friends are dispensable, that marriages are dispensable. They are not and they never will be. Good people are your key to sanity. Good people are your survival.