Ah yes, I’m familiar with the free-floating anxiety. It floats in, it floats out….free floating sounds so carefree doesn’t it? While it may not be as bad as the anxiety that has an exact cause attached to it or a clear reason for being, it certainly isn’t very companionable. It doesn’t surprise me when it makes an appearance though. I think of it as something akin to existential angst. It doesn’t require action to circumvent, merely diversion.
Music often helps me to subsume it. I mean, how can you feel anxious when you’re listening to a feel good song?
I think that I used to have more fear and anxiety when I was younger than I do now. Or maybe the things that cause it are just different now? You learn to deal with and conquer certain fears and then new ones take their place, it’s like playing that old kids game where you hit the hippos with the hammer.
I had thought that I was handling my stress very well lately, all things considered. But then this week Monday and Tuesday were very high anxiety days. The kind of days when I was thinking along the lines of “I have 10 more years of this to go until retirement??!” and wondering how I was going to do it without making a change. I resolved to try to make a job change within the year. Of course then today went much better and I wondered what all that anxiety was for.
Personally I think anxiety can be additive, like stress. Even if the anxiety drivers are constant, when they get activated all at once your circuits overload the same as they do when the stress quotient is too high. A lot of anxiety can be due to worrying too much about things that you can’t control. When you learn to stop trying to control the things that are impossible to control and trust in your capability to deal with things, your resilience to stress and anxiety increases. You don’t become immune to it, but it makes it a little easier to roll with the punches and also not to catastrophize and imagine dire outcomes to things which haven’t happened yet.