# Managing Anxiety
I have covered this subject before, but not from my own Blog. I consider myself to be a successful expert on the subject of anxiety because I am subjected to an insane amount of pressure, but I still manage to beat it every day.
I have built up coping mechanisms. This probably stems from a combination of the will to survive and the need to perform.
So this article is quite personal and close to home. I wish to create something that will be useful to others that are experiencing anxiety on a daily basis and hopefully improve their lives in the long run.
A bit of background on myself:
I consider myself to be a good subject authority on anxiety in general.
I am a single father who is raising two children, although I do have help from my own father who I support financially. So I have a family unit of 4 people, 3 of which are dependent on myself.
I realised that I am the sole provider in this unit and without me there is no income, no money to pay bills and no other options for the family.
So it put me into a situation where I am unable to fail. Failure would just be unacceptable.
This made me very resilient against doubtful thoughts and feelings of anxiety.
There were times when people criticized me and spoke badly of me. Times where they felt emotional or there were perhaps jealous of my successes.
I realised that I was indeed being successful!
It was true that I had achieved a lot more at my work then a lot of other people could not have done in the years that they were in the company before me. This is not my fault. I was not there to change their actions and shape their future.
When I have achieved the success of a completed project and I look back at all the hardships that I had endured, I see the following.
I see that there were a lot of people that were pitted against me, some of them even in my own company. Some people were perhaps jealous and some people that wanted to be difficult because it would put me on further pressure
A lot of the times also the client themselves put you under pressure and of course your immediate superiors - your boss or employer will also put you under pressure at work
Being middle management is probably one of the most stressful positions you can have in a company.
This is because being in the middle of the organisational chart of a company puts you into a position where you are simultaneously an employee as well as a representative of management.
This means that you get to hear a lot of the complaints and demands and inconsistencies from the staff while hearing with the demand to higher quality and workmanship from management.
Usually, I identify with management’s ultimate goal in managing a successful and profitable project while majority of the workers do not understand that this is to their own benefit as well.
There is a balancing act where you need to negotiate between the expectations of the client and your boss, versus the practical application in the form of instructions to the workers.
At the very same time, I still do have 3 family members at home who each have their own life and have their own bits of drama that will then contribute to what I need to deal with.
There is always a challenge set out for you in that regard as well as many of you might understand. Parenting is sometimes an arduous and unforgiving task and often the rewards of parenting only come after a lot of work has been completed.
So let's look at different sources of anxiety.
## 1. Constructed Anxiety
This form of anxiety I have spoken about before in a blog. In a nutshell, what we are really looking at here is that some levels of anxiety are caused by our own attention and focus on problems.
There is also a level of anxiety that comes when we take on too many things and we make it far too personal and important to ourselves.
The way to deal with this constructed anxiety is fairly simple. We need to analyse the root cause of an anxiety to be able to judge whether not it is a valid or a real reason to feel anxious.
## 2. The tug-of-war anxiety
Everybody should understand what the tug of war.
It is a sport where two teams of usually brawny folk would get together and pull on a strong cargo rope or some such in a show of teamwork and strength.
This becomes a great parable when I have to discuss something along the lines of teamwork and cooperation.
In the subject of anxiety however, we are the Rope and often the Rope is being pulled by more than 2 different teams or persons.
So in this form of anxiety it is very often for us to find ourselves caught in between two groups or two individuals (or more).
This happens when we are expected to perform and do things in order to make one group happy but at the same time do the same thing for another opposing group.
Some people in a group or within a family thrive on the drama and create it as a matter of course.
It is important to note that you cannot satisfy everyone and that it is not fair to put yourself into a position of permanent anxiety because you're unable to do so.
Once again one of the dominant requirements to dealing with this issue is to analyse the root cause and to make a decision. You need to be able to decide whether or not the event that is currently happening within a group a family or community is worth your time and worth being anxious about.
## 3. Interpersonal Anxiety
This is one that I no longer really need to deal with because my time for feeling anxious at a simple conversation is far past.
I used to be a very introverted, quiet and shy, but over the years I've needed to learn how to communicate effectively. I feel very sure of myself when I do so.
But to this day I still remember what it is like to deal with these things and I now have the opportunity to see this as an outsider, looking at others.
Where I deal with younger people and a lot of them have this form of anxiety.
This revolves around the fear of speaking to people. Anxiety about how you will be received when you state your opinion and generally worrying about any kind of social interaction.
The Ironic part about this problem is that it does not stem from the outside but rather from the inside.
This issue is no longer something to do with analysing a root cause and logically tackling the idea in order to validate it or to seek a solution.
Instead the method of dealing with this form of anxiety has to do with analysing ourselves and our level of self-esteem.
When you have low self-esteem you cause yourself all manner of damage when you simply do not believe that you are equal in a conversation.
When you communicate to other people you need to be able to believe your own agenda otherwise any communication that you have with others will become a damaging one because you are unable to take your own side.
So then it becomes important to realise that we are responsible for dealing with our self-esteem issues
## Conclusion
So this is been a list of 3 of the most relevant reasons why a person would feel anxious that I've needed to deal with in the last while but it is by No means a fully comprehensive list of all the things that might make a person anxious.
Sometimes we have forms and feelings of anxiety that we make up in our minds.
There will always be factors in life that will put us under pressure. But we choose to take on these items as urgent and extend our anxious thoughts.
It could be your professional career, it could be studies at school, it could be having a relationship, or raising children.
And through all of this we are still expected to be able to function and cope or else no work will get done and we will forever remain unsuccessful.
What is important to do is to target the root causes and to think mercilessly about whether or not that what you feel is a priority or if it is something that you can dump.
I wish you all a great and anxiety-free time!
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