5 Encouraging Facts About Anxiety

If you have an anxiety disorder, you know this emotion can make life miserable in large, uncontrolled doses. But there’s a lot to love about anxiety, and we’re here to shed a positive light on this often maligned state of mind.

At Nexclin Medicine in Roswell, Georgia — we know anxiety.

Dr. Naima Cheema diagnoses and treats all types of anxiety disorders, including phobias, general anxiety disorder, panic disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder. These are serious conditions that call for expert care.

We offer a full range of effective approaches to help you manage your anxiety symptoms, such as:

• Stress management
• Medications
• Cognitive behavioral therapy
• Nutritional counseling

But we also help you learn that anxiety isn’t always bad. Understanding the upside of anxiety may help you deal with it more calmly and perhaps even come to appreciate it. Here are some encouraging facts about anxiety.

1. Anxiety protects you

The purpose of anxiety is to alert you to danger. When you perceive a threat, you experience fear, which is foundational to survival. In dangerous situations, anxiety allows you to quickly analyze a threat and decide how to deal with it. This is commonly called the fight-or-flight response. 

If you have an anxiety disorder, that emotion (although exaggerated) is still letting you know that something around you feels like a threat. Realizing this helps you identify that perceived threat, so you can learn to face it calmly and control your response to it.

2. Anxiety pinpoints areas of need

Anxiety gives you a clue about issues in your life you need to address. For example, consider yourself fortunate if you feel anxious whenever you interact with a certain person or have a panic attack when you go to a specific place. 

Of course, we don’t mean to suggest that anxiety disorders are healthy, only that they provide valuable information about how to resolve them. Our team can help you identify the underlying source of your anxiety and teach you how to respond in a healthier way.

3. Anxiety empowers you to take action

Anxiety floods your body with the hormones adrenaline and cortisol. This is the cool part about the fight-or-flight mode — these hormones give you superpowers:

• Quicker heart rate
• Increased blood pressure
• Faster breathing
• Dilated pupils
• Sharper vision and hearing
• Muscles primed for action

While these may seem like negative responses at first glance, they actually empower you to stay and face the danger or run away to safety.

4. Anxiety promotes self-awareness

In proper doses, anxiety can teach you a lot about yourself and what you value. People tend to experience anxiety when they witness something wrong, such as theft, abuse, or violence. Although you may overreact to the event because of an anxiety disorder, the anxiety itself points you in the right direction — toward what’s good.

Anxiety can also make you more aware of your potential to succeed. For example, if the fear of failure drives you to push through a difficult project at work, you gain confidence from witnessing what you’re capable of accomplishing. Although negative anxiety can sabotage your productivity, the upside is that it can reveal your potential, which may become part of your treatment.

5. Anxiety may indicate higher intelligence

This doesn’t mean that your anxiety makes you smarter, but it may mean that your anxiety disorder is linked to your level of intelligence. Studies show a correlation between high levels of worry and high IQs.

Anxious people tend to be highly critical thinkers, excellent researchers (their minds never stop searching), and deep analyzers. 

The good news, you can use that built-in benefit to help you overcome your anxiety disorder. Doing your own research and working with our team of experts to learn how to resolve your anxiety disorder takes advantage of your disorder in the best possible way.

Call us or book an appointment online today to schedule a consultation with Dr. Cheema and learn how to get your anxiety under control.