🌟 Why Fighting Anxiety Matters
🧭 Sol Bites: 4 Steps to Embrace Anxiety
🎥 Video Bite: Melissa Impett on Coping With Anxiety
💬 Words of Wisdom
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Did you know that there’s an innate threat-detection system in your brain that relies only on your actions, and not your words? Each time you avoid a situation that makes you feel uncomfortable, you’re essentially telling your brain that it’s a threatening experience.
If that happens too often, anxiety starts to compound. The majority of us typically try to overcome anxiety by distracting ourselves. The problem is, when you avoid anxiety, you make your brain even more fearful. The solution, therefore, doesn’t lie in fighting with your anxiety, instead you need to adjust the mechanism that causes it.
Why Fighting Anxiety Matters
Most tips about anxiety treatment are aimed at dealing with its symptoms, rather than addressing its root causes. Coping tools like breathing techniques, distraction techniques, and positive affirmations, may help temporarily ease symptoms, but if you run away from anxiety, then your threat-detecting brain will record more and more false alarms as genuine threats. You end up in a vicious circle where you search for increasingly more severe ways to find relief.
Sol Bites: 4 Steps to Embrace Anxiety
1) Observe the impulse to flee, but resist the urge to actually run off.
In a moment of panic, your brain’s desire for comfort kicks in, which is why you may feel the urge to get away from what’s causing you stress. By recognizing that desire as information, rather than instructions, you start to make an important distinction.
2) Approach, rather than retreat.
Taking a first step toward your source of terror rather than hiding from it helps you begin to alter the messages your brain’s threat detector receives. You don’t have to eliminate your fear all at once. Getting close will be enough to rewire your brain.
3) Allow the panic to exist.
It may feel terrible, but it is not deadly. The more that your response to fear becomes accepting rather than reactive, the less power it holds over you. The fear might not go away, but it just doesn’t matter as much to your brain anymore.
4) Keep trying.
Your threat detector operates on its own schedule and can only be changed by experience, so keep approaching your fears and don’t run from them. Your brain will catch up.
Being confident doesn’t mean living without fear. It means having the history of going through fear not hiding from it. Each time you go through a situation that your brain perceives as scary and emerge from it alive, you’re not only surviving the situation but reprogramming the alarm system for future encounters. Train your brain to trust you.
Because your anxious mind loves old stories—here’s how to teach it new ones.
Video Bite
Sol TV Creator Melissa Impett, shares a simple grounding tool for easing anxious moments and reveals how tapping into meaningful memories can gently shift your mind toward calmer, better‑feeling thoughts.
Words of Wisdom
What you resist not only persists, but will grow in size.
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