Anxiety - are you willing to accept it could be a good thing?

Hi there. I'm wondering, are you looking at this and going, is she mad? Anxiety is not a good thing. I have anxiety. It's not good. My name's Caroline Cavanagh, and I'm here today to try and change your mind and look at anxiety in a different way, because I believe anxiety is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. And let me explain why. Let's take anxiety down to its absolute roots: fear. Primitive man had what we call the fight-or-flight response, and it's one of our most basic instincts. So let's think about primitive man. Let's call him Ugg. So Ugg's going around his day, and suddenly a saber-toothed tiger jumps up in front of him. He's going to need to act pretty quickly, and it's fear. It's the fight or flight response that's automatically triggered. He either kills the tiger or he runs away and he's safe. Or there's a third option, but regardless of whichever of the 3, the drama is very quickly over, and Ug carries on about his normal day. So that fight or flight response, that fear, Has protected him. It's facilitated him by creating his body in a situation where he can fight, or he can have the extra energy to run away and keep himself safe. Fear kept Ug safe. Now let's fast forward a few million years. We have modern man. We're a little less hairy. We've got brick walls and central heating. Good thing. But we've also developed our conscious minds, the ability to think differently. And this conscious mind has a great ability to go into a different time zone. It can go out into the future. But it's still using fear, anxiety, to keep us safe. So now, if we're walking down the road and we think, hmm, need to cross over. Conscious mind thinks, let me just check and see if there's any cars coming. Because if we didn't have that fear of being run over, you'd just walk out and be fucked. You're walking a bit further down the road, you see this really aggressive barking dog. Your anxiety goes, whoa! Don't go any further to that, because it's preempting. If you got too close, that dog could bite you. Fear keeps you in a wide berth. It keeps you safe. A bit further down the road, there's a fire burning. Someone's lit a bonfire. If you didn't know, and you didn't have fear that you know fire burns, you might get too close to that fire and be hurt. So the fear, the anxiety, is keeping you safe. Here's the rub though. This conscious mind thing is going, do you know, with my anxiety I'm doing such a brilliant job of keeping you safe. What else can I do? Now, what could happen in the future? Ah, I might get made redundant. I might lose my job. Whoa. My relationship might split up. Whoa, that'd be really bad. And what if? How many times a day do you have that thought? What if? But unlike that saber-toothed tiger, it's not real. But your brain is going to deal with it in exactly the same way. It's going to trigger that fight-or-flight response. So you're going to get all those feelings of, I need to fight it or run away to keep myself safe. But there is nothing to cause it to stop, and so it goes on. And that is when anxiety becomes a bad thing. But it's not— It's not the anxiety that's the bad thing, it's the triggers. It's the thoughts that are triggering the anxiety. Fundamentally, as an anxiety specialist, that's what I do. I work with people not to take their anxiety away, because anxiety keeps you safe. I help them to start using their mind in a different way to stop that anxiety being triggered, especially by things that haven't happened yet. By things that are out in the future and not even here. Because if they're not here, they're not real. You cannot deal with them in the moment. And now on March the 8th, so if you're watching this on playback, this might have already happened, but that's okay too. I am doing a talk to an international summit called Voice of Women, and I am talking for about 25 minutes on this subject. And what I'm going to be covering is 3 really strong ways of doing what I've just mentioned— changing how you use your mind, not to change your anxiety, because anxiety is a good thing, but to change how that anxiety is getting triggered. I'm going to be putting a link up to the, um, to that site, because if you'd love to register to it, the whole conference is absolutely free. My talk is at 5 PM on Monday the 8th, as I said, and you can listen live to the talk then. But if you register in advance, even if you're not around at 5 o'clock on Monday, you can listen to it after it's been done and have access to all of the recordings and all of the other amazing talks that are going to be going on as well. So do click on that link, register for the conference, pick and choose which ones you want to listen to. And as I said, my talk, which is all about how you can really change your positioning anxiety— it's something that keeps you safe. What you need to learn if your anxiety is deterring from your quality of your day is not to change the anxiety, but to change the thoughts that are triggering the anxiety. I hope you've enjoyed this little teaser. This is something I'm sure we're going to be talking about a lot more in future videos as well, because I love talking about anxiety, and I would love people to stop seeing anxiety as a bad thing. It keeps you safe, but if it's being triggered too much, that's where your problem lies, and that's where people like me Can help you. If you'd like some help, please do get in touch. There's lots of information on my website, carolinecavanagh.co.uk. Lots of free downloadable resources, lots of videos, and lots of blogs, all sharing hints and tips to help you use your mind in a different way. Because when you think in a different way, your anxiety becomes your friend, not your enemy. Thank you. Thank you very much for watching. Please put a comment in the comments box below. Do you agree with me? Can you think you may be able to change just a little bit about how you think about your anxiety? And let me know how you've taken this on board. For now, thank you very much again for watching. Over and out, and I'll see you very soon. Bye.