What Is The Opposite of Anxiety? Everything You Need to Know

Anxiety is characterized by excessive worry, apprehension, and restlessness. Usually, mild levels of anxiety are a normal reaction to stressful situations, and it is natural to feel anxious under pressure.

In some cases, anxiety can help you deal with stress better and might actually make you productive. However, persistent anxiety that terrifies and makes your heart pound, and causes multiple worrisome physical symptoms to the point that your daily routine is negatively impacted, can be problematic.

It is okay to feel nervous or anxious when you are challenged at work or when you are trying to attempt a difficult task and make a big decision for life by weighing all the pros and cons.

However, experiencing debilitating fear everyday and getting overwhelmed with your personal as well as professional lives can be a sign of an anxiety disorder.

Anxiety disorders are medically classified as one of the top mental healthcare concerns around the world. If left undiagnosed or untreated, the symptoms are more likely to worsen over time.

Is Anxiety The Same as Fear?

Fear could be one of the outcomes of extreme anxiety. But anxiety and fear are two distinct emotions. Fear is temporary and more aligned with the present situation. Whereas, anxiety is more future-focused and triggered when stress is perceived as a threat.

It is your emotional response to a long impending danger, which is kind of like preparing yourself to deal with the “what if” aspect of different situations in your life.

Recurring anxious thoughts are a common symptom of anxiety disorders. Here are the most commonly witnessed anxiety symptoms you should know to manage your anxiety better:

• Trouble falling asleep
• Eating disorders due to stress
• Inability to focus on work, studies, or daily routines in general
• Excessive sweating and palpitations
• Constant panic attacks or perceived fear of panic attacks that are yet to happen
• Constant irritability
• Agitated feelings
• Feeling drained out and experiencing muscle strain
• Difficulty in managing excessive worry and stress
• Fear of social interactions

These symptoms of clinical anxiety can also co-occur with other mental health problems, such as depression and mania. Your psychiatrist or therapist will use a wide range of screening tests and tools to determine the severity of your anxiety symptoms.

What is The Opposite of Anxiety?

There are different interpretations of which emotion is the exact opposite of anxiety. It also partially depends on what motivates you to prevent an undesirable outcome in the future.

Every free-thinking individual thinks and functions differently. So, what encourages you to act in a particular way will stem from your unique thought process and set of motivations.

For example, I often perform excellently well under moderate to high anxiety and pressure. So, sometimes a little anxiety could be a good thing. In my case, it motivates me to work harder and achieve my goals. I agree it might be taxing on my brain and body, but it works well for me. However, is it sustainable? I doubt that.

So what do you do when you experience this on an everyday basis? Do you put up with anxiety till it sucks all the energy and enthusiasm out of you?

The answer is, of course, NO. It is not recommended to keep going like this till you reach your breaking point. Even though this approach gets the job done, it might make you feel extremely exhausted, both mentally and physically, at the end of the day.

How to Interpret The Opposite of Anxiety?

Some say that the opposite of anxiety is peace. Yes, to an extent, peace could be the emotion you are trying to chase when you are feeling a surge of excessive anxiety. But peace is essentially your end goal.

Therefore, you need to think about how you can attain peace and that will be the opposite of anxiety.

Let me break this down further.

• The first step is to know the cause of your anxiety or what kind of thoughts lead you to anxiety. For example, what if people make fun of me, what if I don’t pass the exam, what if people ignore me, and so on?
• Once you have identified your negative thoughts triggering anxiety, pause and counter-question them for a minute, asking yourself questions such as “Why would people make fun of me,” “why will I not pass the exam” or “Why will people ignore me.” And visualize success or positive outcomes by having trust and confidence in yourself.
• If your anxiety is amplified by imagining failure in advance, try and counteract this situation by picturing yourself experiencing success in the future. And when can that happen? It happens when you trust yourself fully and trust well enough so that you can achieve the success you always imagined or craved for.

So, the opposite of anxiety is the emotion of trust which eventually leads to comfort and safety.

These questions can help you identify your capabilities, your strengths, and weaknesses and eventually develop more conviction in yourself.

Conclusion

So, try to know what motivates you to do better, have faith in your journey, pre-visualize the transformation, and execute that action early on to prevent future failures.

This way, you will encounter flaws in your strategy in advance which will prevent a hard fall and lead to better outcomes.

Anxiety makes us avoid things that cause immense stress and this is the reason why we fail to address pressing challenges leaving them unresolved. These unresolved challenges get stuck in a loop and keep haunting us all our life.

When it comes to tackling anxiety, taking a well-calculated opposite action is key to getting positive results. For instance, trust is hard to come by, but it is a risk you should be willing to take to keep your anxiety under control.

So, trust your process and keep going till you feel better. But make sure you do this mindfully.

What do you think is the opposite of anxiety? Tell me in the comments section below.