Lifestyle

Coping with Anxiety, Fears and Phobias

August 16, 2017

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I guess all of us have anxiety at some point in life. Whether it is caused by an external or an internal agent, fears will make us feel insecure. Every time we have anxiety is due to irrational ideas. These ideas have lived in our past and they don’t have any foundation in our present life. Therefore, anxiety feeds feelings and issues that reinforce irrational ideas and make us feel lost in the unknown future.

I have dealt with anxieties before. Thank God is not a bigger issue for me that requires medical treatment. However, it requires self-conscious treatment. Every time I have an international trip I want to plan everything ahead and I get afraid I won’t be able to accomplish all the things I’d like to do. Even when I feel unmotivated or I have family problems I became anxious because I don’t know what the future holds (uncertainty) for me and for those I love. I don’t know if you knew this but I have several phobias such as Ornithophobia (fear of birds), Alektorophobia (fear of chickens) and Ichthyophobia (fear of fish).  Therefore, when I am a near a bird; it gives me anxiety.  When I was younger I didn’t know what to do when I felt anxious I thought I didn’t have any tool to overcome it. However, I have realized that if I identified what triggers my anxiety, then I can make sure that I’ll be alright and it’s just the same fear that makes me become anxious.

Here is a short story of how I became afraid of birds. When I was a child I remember I had these beautiful Australian budgerigar birds. I loved to touch them, to feed them, and to play with them. Until one day I saw how the male bird started to eat the baby eggs and attacked the other birds. That was something that really disgusted me. I told my father that that bird was attacking the other ones, so he put the aggressive one isolated from the rest (they were in a huge two stories cage) and it seems that this was working for a while. Unfortunately, this bird was so aggressive that he ended up eating and killing all of the other birds in the cage! I don’t even know how he did it! The worst part is that during this was happening to my baby pets, my grandfather was dying in the hospital, so my parents weren’t at home when this awful event happened. I was so scared and I felt this sensation of revulsion towards any type of birds. Nowadays, every time I see this specific type of budgerigar birds in a pet store I really want to throw up!  As a consequence of this event in my childhood, I am now afraid of all birds!  Now, if you were asking yourself if I do eat chicken and/or eggs. Well, I do NOT eat either anymore. I used to eat chicken and eggs when I was a teen, but I guess every time I want to eat either or I get to see the picture of the chicken in my head and I lost my appetite.

The day of my birthday I went to the zoo. Even though I know that I am so afraid of birds, I wanted to see the flamingos just to overcome fears. I was so ready and happy and I had prepared myself for this encounter, but guess what? They were not there. They were put away to sleep 5 minutes before my arrival. So disappointed! Nevertheless, there were other birds, but I could not stand the idea of being near them, so I felt really anxious and try to meditate in my head. At the end of the day I was able to pass by a Cockatoo, yes it was a really stressful moment.

In order to control more these types of anxieties, I try to practice the mindfulness meditation. I usually practice this meditation once or twice per week. It only takes 3 or 5 minutes of my time. I just set my mind to be blank and don’t think about any past lived events or what the future holds. I guess you can practice it while listening to nice mindfulness peaceful music. You can find some good music on Spotify. You can find these songs by typing mindfulness meditation songs. So, I’ll see how it starts working for me. I also watched a documentary on Netflix about the law of attraction and it basically is about how thinking positive makes your day and your future wishes unfold in front of you because the universe will respond to you. It’s a great one! I guess everything correlates to your emotional states in this life.

That’s it for now about this topic. I’d love to hear if you have suffered from anxiety and if you have any types of phobias.  If you have any tips about anxiety and how to deal with it just let me know in the comments below.

Disclaimer: This post is not sponsored. I am not a Psychologist or a Psychiatrist. This is just based on personal experience facts. 

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