Life
People Draw What Anxiety Looks Like
BuzzFeed's video asking people with anxiety to draw what their anxiety looks like is both highly relevant and important to discuss. Anxiety is something many — if not most — people struggle with at one point or another. This is not an accident or a coincidence. Despite having evolved tremendously (if you compare our overall quality and understanding of life and bodies and existence to, say, 250 years ago) we still have a lot of work to do on the front of emotional intelligence. The quick answer is that we've eliminated natural threats in our environment, so our animal bodies are malfunctioning from non-use of their "fight or flight" "survivalist" instincts. The longer, more important answer is that we simply want to "get rid" of anxiety because it's unpleasant, without recognizing that it serves a very crucial purpose — to keep us alive — and so our minds misguided and exacerbate it.
Emphasizing the importance of the need to talk about these issues more is how absolutely devastating anxiety can be. Especially as we begin to spiral with it — anxiety tends to induce more anxiety — and compounded on all the social stigmas and fears that are so closely married to it, it seems like an inescapable labyrinth that we never really chose to enter in the first place. To (quite literally) illustrate what this feels like, a few people over at BuzzFeed volunteered to draw what anxiety is like, and the results are heartbreaking. From being inextricably tied to it to seeing your bed as the only safe zone to running out of money — the following is a brutal look at what too many of us are familiar with.
