The Only Trick You Need To Overcome Anxiety

Life comes at your hard. We get hit with illnesses, breakups and sackings.

There's a lot that we can't control, and focusing on them leads to anxiety as we feel powerless to our future - a scary feeling.

So how do we minimise this feeling of anxiety? Seneca's way of dealing with it is to have low expectations of what we can't control. But what does this mean in practice?

It means that when life hits you, and you feel down, you have the ask yourself the question:

Well, what did I expect?

Did I expect my life to never be hit with unforeseen circumstances? Why on earth would I expect that?

Remember, you're not special. And everything that happens to you has already happened to someone else.

You're just a tiny speck in this mystical existence we're all trying to navigate through. There's a lot out there you can't control, and that's okay.

Now you may be thinking, but I can control getting sacked, I could be a hard worker who always turns up early and leaves late.

True.

But you can't control your boss liking you. Even if you do everything right, you can't shrink yourself down into an atom-sized you, travel into his brain and mess with his neuro-transmitters so that he suddenly likes you and wants to keep you on.

Of course, working hard day-in and day-out makes it a lot less likely that you'll be sacked. But ultimately, the decision isn't in your hands.

You can't control how other people think. And that's fine.

Instead, when something beyond your control happens, think of it as indifferent.

If you can't control it, then how could it be thought of as good or bad? It's just something that's happened.

Once you feed this mentality into your life, you suddenly feel less frustrated when things go wrong - after all, if you can't affect the result, why should it even matter?

So what should you focus on?

There are certain things we can control - how we act and how we think (most of the time).

If we are doing all the right things (acting with courage, wisdom, self-discipline and justice), then the result shouldn't matter, it's beyond our control, and therefore indifferent.

Focus on the person you want to become, rather than the results you want to achieve.

And who knows, it might make it a whole lot likelier that you get the results anyway...