How can I learn to deal with anxiety and motivation?

Thank you, Johnathan, for reaching out and asking this important question. Rest assured, you are not alone in your experience of increasing worry in a world that can sometimes feel unmanageable. When the environment in which you live feels overwhelming it can be difficult to find the motivation to change. Worry and anxiety can end up feeling like a trap or a deep hole where you are unable to find your way out of the darkness. Luckily there are techniques you can implement to help you move forward in unburdening your shoulders from the weight of constant worry and anxiety. 

Although, the human brain's mechanism utilizes anxiety and worry for a purpose (basically to keep us from harm and aid us in navigating situations by solving problems and making plans) in the event that the mechanism becomes overstimulated, the brain becomes caught in a worry loop that is difficult to interrupt. You may become frozen in this state not knowing how to move forward to motivate yourself to make change. This worry loop can also keep you in a state of trying to solve problems or create change where you know, for a fact, no change will ever come to fruition despite your best efforts. 

The author Alex Korb Phd, in his book The Upward Spiral, explains that worrying worsens your mood; when your mood is worsened your worrying increases which leads to even more negativity in your mood and so on. This experience becomes a vicious cycle. Hence why you are finding it difficult to motivate movement and create change. 

All that being said, you can implement some daily tools to help interrupt the vicious cycle and the downward spiral. Recognizing the things or situations you can and do control will help you begin changing this never-ending cycle of worry, hyper-anxiety and feeling frozen.

Start by paying attention to the choices you are making in your daily life. When you awaken, what side of the bed are you choosing to get out of, what clothes are you choosing to wear? Throughout the day, what food are you choosing to eat? Are you choosing to carry out your work or school obligations? How are you choosing to treat yourself today?

We tend not to recognize how we are motivating ourselves to make choices each and every day; we discount them due to the habitual nature of most of these daily choices. Once you have accepted that you are, in fact, making choices and creating change in your daily life, you will improve your belief in your ability to make additional change; motivating yourself to engage in the "normal" things you believe are part of the human life. It is the snowball effect. Once you start the small changes, the big changes will follow with less effort. 

Once you have identified your active engagement in daily choices and change, take some time to identify the life changes you want to make but have not yet done so.

• Write down the life changes you want to make but have not done yet.
• After you have created a list of the things you want to change, choose the one that seems to be the easiest to address.
• Take that one thing and identify the steps it will take to complete the task. 
• After you have outlined the steps, open your calendar and assign each step to its own calendar day. Keep in mind that you want the steps to be attainable. 
• Once you have completed one of your goals, go on to the next.

You will find that once you begin the process of engaging in and accomplishing your goals you will be motivated to address the other things you want to change, leading to an interruption of the vicious worry loop. 

One suggestion that Alex Korb, Phd suggests is to make an anti-laziness rule: "Decide ahead of time that you'll take the stairs for anything less than three floors. Decide that you'll walk to do any errand that is less than a mile away or bike to any that are less than two miles away. Commit to never taking an escalator if the stairs are right next to it. Don't circle the parking lot looking for a closer space, just take the first one you see" (Korb, 2015, p. 91). Challenging yourself to make these types of decisions can help redirect your worry from feeling frozen to feeling active. Again, increasing your belief in yourself. 

In regards to the things you are attempting to change that you cannot change, it is important to employ the skill of detachment. There is a meditation titled Leaves on a Stream. In this meditation you imagine yourself sitting by a stream. As you are watching the stream go by you notice there are leaves floating along, just peacefully making their way down the stream, enjoying the tiny waves of water. Imagine that you are taking the things you cannot change or control and placing them on the leaves. You calmly watch as the leaves take them away slowly but surely down the stream. You have now detached from your expectation that you can control or change these things. If you find yourself re-attaching to them in the future, remind yourself that you have already sent them down the stream and have no ability to take them back. Just let them go on down the stream. You can also use this technique to reduce anxiety by imaging you are placing your anxious thoughts on the leaves and watching them travel away from you - again detaching and letting go. 

When it comes to climbing out from under the burden of anxiety and worry to create change it comes down to implementing the simplest skill in small incremental ways. You can only focus on one thing at a time, one day at a time, one change at a time. Take your time, allow yourself to focus on one change at a time, detach from the things you cannot change and you will find within less time than you would expect that you are able to easily complete the "normal" things, along with finding motivation to engage in the longer term goals you want to achieve.