Anxious behavior is not something unusual for every one of us. We all have moments when we feel uncertain and unprepared to take the next step. With anxiousness, our mind often shows us that we need to look deeper into what we do, analyze how we do it, and find the best way to change the situation. However most people feel anxious in their personal or professional lives, but most cannot identify the anxious behavior. And what can’t be identified can’t be transformed.
Many groups of factors are identified as those causing anxious behavior. But with all of them in sight, people still struggle to remember that behavior and take responsible steps to change it. Below, you will find a list of characteristics to help you assess your behavior and see if it is anxious and causing you some trouble in the long run. The list is incomplete but recognizes most demonstrated behaviors from 1087 people whose conduct has been analyzed for over two years.
Filtering
The characteristic of the individual’s behavior that I most often see and primarily do not understand. Filtering is a kind of defense mechanism that comes to help people procrastinate. It is a characteristic of anxious behavior that helps people slow processes. While filtering, people often move with the least challenging path, bringing the least effective solutions. The more people filter information, circumstances, environment, and other people around them, the less productive environment they create. And the less productive the atmosphere created is, the more it works against change, uncertainty, and high dynamics.
Discount positivity
When the environment is disconnected, people start feeling bored. And the boring person becomes irrelevant and often disconnects from positivity. Anxious behavior benefits from that situation because created ones create rigidness, lowering the connection to the results. People who disconnect from positivity start thinking and producing negative thoughts and actions. Their whole agenda turns from winning and building to staying the same and not moving too much to “save yourself” from uncertainty and effort to work toward some change.
Should statements on the battlefield
An anxious person does sound convinced and sure that something has to happen. Often, anxious people talk just because the situation insists on that, but in most cases, they don’t engage in some actions to change the environment and others. With the SHOULD mindset, these people declare they are uncomfortable engaging with efforts. In the long run, SHOULD statements are turned into NO statements in an anxious person’s head. No matter how it looks in the beginning, the more the individual feels unsafe and threatened, the more the actions and commitments from their side become questionable.
Personalization with pain
Anxious people believe in karma. And not only that, they believe in the bad karma. Whatever happens and has a negative connotation, the anxious person believes they take part in the guilt. Suffering that imaginary pain is a defense mechanism, but it shows that the person is weak and others better leave them backward while trying to implement change or progress. The stronger this mechanism is in the anxious person’s life, the better they feel they have built a defense wall against change, uncertainty, and challenges.
Blaming being safe
It is the easiest thing to do – projecting the guilt on someone else, or better said, something else, is one of the ways to deal with anxiousness. The anxious individual moves their locus of control from internal and dependent on them to the external environment where they do not have enough power to change the situation for good. Blame is always a good thing for the anxious person because it lowers the stress level and creates a scenario when this person feels like the one who has taken all the credit for trying to achieve something – no matter the result. It somehow creates a psychological safety trap against failure.
Ruminating
What can you do if a challenging situation comes to your door? Part of the people will answer with action. This is not the case with the anxious individual. They start from the small details to think it all. And they do it slowly and with care, as that type of person will say. And it takes forever to reach a simple solution. Thinking from all sides and procrastinating action is always a good start for the anxious person. They don’t go well with deadlines when thinking about something. The thought is everything at that moment and goes beyond time and space.
Overthinking
A typical behavior that an anxious person shows is procrastination. One of the most damaging aspects of this behavior is overthinking. The nervous individual thinks and thinks…and thinks. They invest much time into going through one of the elements several times and looking at it from different times. Many scenarios come from nowhere to confirm that there is much time needed. Delays, when overthinking, sometimes become unmanageable. And with all delays, there is only one end goal: to delay everything so long that it becomes irrelevant in time and toward the situation. This action aims to “save” the anxious person from the duty to mitigate damages from delays and invest efforts and energy in uncertain tasks and activities.
Emotional reasoning
“Logic is the most powerful weapon of the great philosopher, ” Aristotle said. And this is what scares the anxious person most. Logic insists on action, proving something is right or wrong. On the other hand, there is a tool that cannot be traced and explained logically. And these are our emotions. No matter what we do, if it is based on our feelings, only we can judge the result. Emotions create an untraceable path to success, managed only by the person. Emotions are not countable. For most of us, emotions are not easy to follow and have different faces for each person. What may look like a negative emotion for one may be explained as a positive understanding and feeling from others. Anxious people use emotions because they give them the power to create explanations based on their internal world and feelings. They are not dependable on something widely accepted as logic, creating demand.
IN CONCLUSION:
The anxious person is mostly insecure, works toward change with emotions, and rejects logic and analysis. The more people build on their anxiousness, the lower their results. For a fundamental change, the first step must be to recognize the anxious behavior and then plan how to change it for good.
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