While too much and anxiety can be debilitating, too little and anxiety is not good either.
We need a certain amount of anxiety to motivate us to take care of things that matter to us.
Beta was lying in bed debating whether to hit snooze one more time.
He checked the clock at six a.m. His train left in one hour.
Better imagine the consequences of having to take a later one, which would mean being late to his first
meeting of the day.
His boss definitely would not take that will.
Beater turned off his alarm and get up to work.
Peter was experiencing the right amount of anxiety enough to get him up and out of bed on time, and
not so much that he felt overwhelmed or that it embarrassed his performance.
Like Peter, we have the ability to imagine future outcomes that depend on our actions, whether it's
work, a job interview, a competitive event or anything else.
We know our actions affect what happens.
This knowledge creates a heightened state of energy and motivation to give our best third performance.
CBT looks at the connections among those feelings and behaviors with an anxiety.
The thoughts are focused on threat.
The feelings include nervousness and fear, and the behaviors include efforts to prevent the feared
outcomes.
Blah's experiences with an anxiety as he waited for news of her mother looked like this and thought,
What if my mom has cancer?
What if something goes wrong during surgery?
Feelings, anxious, tense behaviors, reading medical websites, pacing, checking phone.
Laura worries about her mother's health fuel, her anxiety and tension, which in turn cause her more
worried thoughts, her feelings and behaviors interact and reinforce one another, creating a tightly
wound state of anxious apprehension.
While Laura's anxiety manifested as intense worries, there are many ways that an anxiety shows up in
our lives.