More people today are reporting that they experience severe anxiety than ever before. While everyone on earth deals with nervousness and fear from time to time, the amount of people dealing with anxiety that’s so constantly present and intense it’s overwhelming has steadily increased. If you’re one of those people, you know exactly how terrible anxiety can feel, and how strong the motivation is to solve it, or at least get it under control!
You may be wondering if something in your life that you can actually change might be causing your anxiety, or if the root cause is out of your control. The answer to this question is different for everyone, but doing some self-reflection and trying to find out is almost always a worthwhile exercise! Here are some steps you can take to try and find the cause of your anxiety.
Keep a Journal
The first thing you’re going to want to do to start getting down to the root of your anxiety is to keep a journal or record. This doesn’t have to be a free-form “pour your heart out” type of journal if that isn’t your thing. In fact, it might be better to take a more structured approach, recording the instances where you felt the most anxious, what you were doing, what you had done before and were planning to do directly after, what was running through your head, what your health and wellness looked like that day, etc.
What you’re trying to do here is isolate a pattern that might help you understand and control your anxiety better. Maybe you find you’re only anxious before or after you talk to an intimidating figure in your life like a boss or a teacher. Maybe thinking about getting sick sends you into a nervous tailspin, and you never noticed the correlation before. It could be that something like lack of sleep is aggravating your anxiety or making it worse, and by addressing that problem, you can feel less overwhelmed. Certain medications even have anxiety as a side effect, and switching to a new prescription might be the key. Try to keep detailed notes for at least a few weeks, then look back and see if anything catches your attention!
Identify Stressors
Anxiety is sometimes an internal problem that doesn’t have a specific reason or trigger behind it in your life, and sometimes it comes from a very specific source. Highly demanding jobs or classes, toxic relationships with family members, friends, or significant others, intense stress like a move or a job loss, unsafe living situations, or any number of other circumstances might be the root cause of your anxiety, and by taking action to address that cause, you can change how your anxiety affects you.
This might come up in your journaling process, or it might be something so ingrained in your daily habits and what you consider normal that you have to look a little deeper for it. However, if you can identify something like this that’s causing your anxiety, working to change it, even if that change is stressful and scary in the moment, can often be much better for you in the long run. Cutting off a cruel or dangerous person in your life, switching jobs, or dropping tough classes are not easy decisions to make, but staying in bad situations at the cost of your mental health always takes a serious toll in the end.
Explore Your Fears
If the surface levels of your life and situation haven’t provided you with any answers when you look closely, it might be time to take things even deeper, and peer into some of the root fears that might be causing your anxiety. Everybody has these deep worries, like fear of death, abandonment, discomfort with conflict, or even past traumas that are unique to your life. When you carry these fears and painful memories around for years without addressing them or dealing with them, they frequently escape in the form of anxiety that can quickly become debilitating.
Delving into these deep and scary feelings is something no one likes doing, and you may find you don’t have it in you to do it alone. This is okay, and working with a therapist or mental health professional to cope with these fears is actually one of the best ways to get through them! By admitting these feelings to yourself and processing them, you can often greatly reduce your anxiety and work to improve your overall outlook on life.
When Changes Don’t Help
If this self-reflection and situation changing doesn’t prove to be helpful for you, it is possible that your anxiety simply has no root cause, and you’re dealing with something called GAD, or generalized anxiety disorder. This can be disheartening to hear, because you may feel like there’s nothing you can do to feel better. However, this is far from the truth! There are still lots of techniques, therapeutic methods, and even medications that can help you gain better control of your anxiety, even without a source to address. For some people, participating in clinical trials is the best way to gain access to cutting-edge new medications and free medical care for their anxiety. You can learn more about our anxiety clinical trials here.