The title above may shock you but honestly, watch the video below and you'll see what I mean.
The girl in this short film is battling against a creature that stays by her side constantly. Waiting for her to encounter social interactions, dating, work or anything that pushes her out of her comfort zone.
Her crocodile clings to her, wont leave her alone and lets her know that its around.
Anxiety does this too.
It sits in the shadows, always there, ready to protect you whenever it thinks you’re in danger. However, sometimes it gets a bit too excited and starts to misbehave. It starts to suffocate you at work, home and everywhere else. You feel uncomfortable when you go out. You feel terror when you would otherwise feel normal and confident.
Just like the crocodile, we don’t understand why its happening. Why we cant just do that presentation, why we are starting to shake in the queue in Tesco. So we begin to hate the feeling. Just like the girl does in the video. She throws the crocodile out the window, pushes it away and begs it to stop.
But the more she fights the more it clings on.
When you experience anxiety, you might start to worry about it, wonder whether people will notice and pray that it will go away. You might tense yourself when you feel it coming on or get frustrated and enter into an internal battle with yourself about how you wish you were the person that existed before anxiety. You become self conscious and start to back out of your normal activities, just in case it comes back and people will see how scared you are.
You become less confident, less likely to say yes to things and as a result the anxiety grows bigger.
The girl in this film realised that fighting and pushing the crocodile away didn’t work. She recognised that the crocodile was there to protect her. It was loyal to her but it had no boundaries. She discovered that she could live with the crocodile but began to gently train it to sit at her side rather than climb all over her and suffocate her life.
The honest truth is that we cant get rid of anxiety because its built in to our very make up. It is there to keep us alive and has been doing so since the beginning of our existence as a species.
It’s there to alert us when we are in danger which makes it the most loyal, advanced and responsive part of ourselves.
It is actually one of the biggest assets a human has and you can use it to your advantage.
However, sometimes it needs a bit of training. The key to letting go of anxiety is to stop fighting it. Instead, you can see it as something that is trying to help you and with more confidence you can view seeing yourself as someone who has the ability to cope, to achieve, to succeed.
I can help you to do this. I work with people by helping them to change their relationship with anxiety. I help them to train the anxiety to become something that serves them, not something that overwhelms them.
If you would like to get your anxiety under control then give me a call on 07525051263. I help people with anxiety issues in Brackley, Banbury and the surrounding areas and I can help you too.