Understanding Anxiety: How Listening to Your Body's Signals Can Guide Life Decisions

Action: Tune into your body's signals to better understand and manage feelings of anxiety and indecision.

Content: Understand how modern distractions divert you away from your body's messages. Begin attuning to your intuition and transform anxious feelings into helpful guides.

Outcome: Learn to interpret your body's wisdom for clear, concise decisions and choices.

Understanding Anxiety and Body Signals

If you've ever tried to hold a beachball underwater, you know that no matter how hard you try, that ball is destined to burst to the surface. It's only a matter of time.

Similarly, our bodies send signals, much like the persistent pressure of a submerged beach ball, to nudge our attention toward the choices and directions we take.

But if we ignore these hints, they often well up and overwhelm us. So it pays to hear what our bodies have to say.

Yet, maybe we don't always listen to our bodies' messages, and perhaps we don't even know how.

Since we are surrounded by influences that pull us out of the present moment, it's easy to turn a blind eye and fail to read our emotional compass amidst the daily hustle.

Later, the quiet of bedtime hours may open the way to questions about life direction, past decisions, and future choices that surface and swirl through your mind.

When external noise dissipates, internal noise is amplified.

This disquiet can cause anxious feelings—a sense of trepidation or unease. An apprehension that is hard to define or overcome.

So what do you do? 

Maybe you divert your gaze. A book, your phone, or a tedious task provides a convenient and familiar off-ramp from tuning in to your body's signals to confront the broader questions or tensions you face.

Diversion is a skill honed from an early age. When a child has a tantrum, we often offer distractions like sugar or screens, perpetuating the unhelpful notion that big emotions are inconvenient and should be dampened down.

Yet, as you may have experienced, denial or avoidance prolongs disquiet and preoccupation. Over time, this will reduce your confidence in addressing the very issues demanding your attention.

Common Anxiety Triggers and Their Meanings

For this reason, developing a constructive relationship with anxious or ill-defined feelings is essential. Transforming feelings of unease into informative allies helps you uncover and make authentic choices aligned with your desired experience.

This can be particularly helpful when addressing common professional conundrums, such as assessing whether to apply for a new role or stay or leave your current workplace.

To begin, you need to harness a skill: Attuning to your body's intuition. This ability requires a comfortable relationship with still and quiet - and most of us will do almost anything to avoid stillness. 

Recall the last time you waited in line for the bathroom or for a friend in a public meeting space. There's a fair chance you reached for your phone.

While this isn't bad or wrong, it does illustrate how modern habits bind us to a state of doing, instead of simply being. As a result, you might miss the whispers your body wants to share.

To illustrate how your body provides vital emotional information, it pays to listen to the language of discomfort.

Imagine someone who panics on planes or elevators, feels most disquieted when alone, or dislikes crowds. Another might feel the peak of apprehension when their partner returns from work.

In each of these examples, the themes of unease offer clues to the unconscious issues at play.

The Language of Anxiety

Panic that centres on being alone may be a clue that it's time to reclaim community.

If friendships feel lonely, this might signal a need to show up as your authentic self or find different friends.

If someone is experiencing fear in elevators or tunnels and the issue centres around being trapped or stuck, it's worth asking where else they might feel mired.

In their job or relationship, perhaps? For one feeling stranded, saying yes to every request and placing everybody else’s demands before their own, the internal tension may beckon them to speak up and express their rights and wants.

The messages sent through the body will often lead you to the core of the matter.

After all, as Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, 'there is more wisdom in your body than in your deepest philosophy.'

And if we ignore the body’s whispers, they’ll soon turn in to shouts - determined to garner out attention.

To hear the truth, we must get quiet and be prepared to surf whatever emotional wave arises.

Listening to discomfort often reveals messages about deeper themes in our lives.

For instance, a person prone to confusion when making a decision will often discover their uncertainty or hesitation is fuelled by a desire to please others or avoid losing face.In this case, confusion becomes a choice - a placeholder for procrastination to avoid potential conflict or uncomfortable outcomes.

Overcoming Ambivalence in Decision-Making

Acknowledging the root cause of our restlessness and distraction is not easy for most of us; similarly, the clarity we need to be resolute and make firm decisions can be elusive. Instead, we may find ourselves in the slough of ambivalence.

Ambivalence—the state of having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas—occurs when someone can't make up their mind or make a decision because they’re lost in the pros and cons.

See if any of these common tensions resonate:

• Career Changes: You might want a better job but fear losing stability.

• Relationships: You're torn between valuing companionship and fearing the loss of independence.

• Health Choices: You want to quit smoking but enjoy the immediate gratification of a cigarette.

• Education: You aim for higher learning but worry about the fallout from costs or potential failure.

• Parenting: You're caught between the joy of having kids and the required compromise in lifestyle changes.

• Social Interactions: You want to voice your thoughts in a group but fear judgment.

• Financial Decisions: You need a home or car but are anxious about financial commitments.

• Retirement: You're excited about freedom but concerned about financial security and purpose.

Ambivalence invites the dilemma of 'If I do this, I will lose that. But if I do that, I’ll miss this.' FOMO

Listening carefully, you might realise that ambivalence masks an underlying fear of what you assume you will lose if you make the 'wrong' decision.

To counter this, it helps to cut to the chase with a set of questions to address the potential consequences of indecision:

To combat the should I/shouldn't I predicament, it's crucial to get clear on the potential consequences of procrastination:

• What advantages might you miss by not making a decision?

• What are the potential repercussions of not deciding?

• What if there was no wrong decision?

Suppose you or someone you know is experiencing ambivalence. In that case, it will help to describe one option in detail—including the pros and cons—to help move through the tyranny of standstill and indecision. Ultimately, the goal is to make a decision and commit to it.

Conclusion: Finding Clarity Through Body Awareness

Often, there is no one correct path in life. In this case, the best thing you can do is decide with the determination that you will make it right.

And where does this begin?

By being willing and receptive to your intuition's messages, you can replace confusion and indecisiveness with clarity and clear resolve.

In other words, you release the pressure and guide your irrepressible beachball to the surface.