Anxiety or Excitement?

Did you know that anxiety and excitement feel the same in the body? I did not know that.

I was listening to Dr. Benjamin Hardy who was explaining this. Immediately, it made sense to me, I just hadn't thought about it in this light. So the idea is that if I want to manage my anxiety, I can do so through my thought process of accepting the bodily sensations as excitement and interrupting a negative pattern.

So for me, this means changing my action (or reaction as it might be) to the event to be in harmony with feeling excitement. It's all in my mind and how I interpret it. I mean. I know I've felt an exciting apprehension before in my life. You know that feeling, where you're almost scared to believe and feel too good lest it not go through.

For instance when you put down a bid on your first realty investment. I don't know about you, but my stomach got knots, even while my breathing became shallow and I felt like I couldn't get enough air. I was an anxious mess!

Or was I? Maybe I was really excited, but the way I perceived it had to change. Instead of knots that feeling can be described as butterflies in the stomach and I always feel the excitement in my upper chest like a tightness.

So I do know I have felt that anxious feeling of excitement and anticipation. A little bit of both. So the next time I start feeling anxiety, I'm going to try and reframe it around excitement instead. If you try this, let me know how you make out.