You Decide If You Live or Just Survive
You decide if you live or just survive. If you let yourself go with the flow, going through life carefully on your tiptoes because of the many dangers it presents, or if you take risks and enjoy whatever life throws your way. Because he who takes no risks earns nothing, and in this life, unfortunately, no matter how much we want to, we cannot control everything that happens around us.
You decide if you live under the weight of your worries over the thousands of misfortunes that could happen to you and those you love, or if you accept uncertainty as just another part of your life. At the end of the day, making a mountain of a molehill is just another of the options available to each of us in our daily lives.
However, if, despite all of this, you cannot avoid feeling like your excessive worry over many circumstances in your daily life are weighing you down, then you also suffer from what is known as generalized anxiety disorder, better known as GAD.
“Who is not a prisoner to need, is a prisoner of fear: some don’t sleep for anxiety of having things that they do not have, and others don’t sleep by the panic of losing things they do have.”
-Eduardo Galeano-
You suffer more if you live without living
If you live without living, trying to avoid everything bad, in the end you are going to suffer without the thing you are trying to avoid actually happening. Anticipating a possible source of suffering, an accident, a catastrophe, just makes you suffer over something that has not come to be and that very likely never will.
This constant worrying leads you to have problems with your concentration and a hard time sleeping, because you are constantly thinking about a dramatic future in which extremely daily situations are affected by horrible things. You think the reason why your child hasn’t called you is because they have had an accident or that you will be unable to do the jobs that you boss will eventually ask of you.
And this will all lead to you having a lower performance level, which implies, in part, confirming your worries and thus confirming the feeling that leads you to be constantly worried. Which leads to a vicious circle that feeds on your discomfort and anxiety itself, because if you feel anxiety, you have a worse performance.
The cause of this is none other than anxiety, which does not let you do things in the best way possible, and that is why you feel more irritable than usual.
Furthermore, this is complemented by physical alterations that anxiety causes in our bodies, which, in the case of generalized anxiety disorder, tend to manifest themselves in the form of muscular tension and fatigue. So if you have constant muscular pain, without anything to justify this, or you are incapable of exercising as much as you used to, it could be because anxiety is leaving its mark on your body.
You decide if you live your life
You keep deciding if you live your own life. If you accept that everyone, without exception, is going to suffer at some point and that, moreover, those who worry about it do nothing to help themselves avoid this, you can break that vicious circle.
There are many people who do not live out their dreams because they are too busy living out their fears. You can decide what kind of person you are going to be, one of those who lives and enjoys every second of his life or one of those who doesn’t live because they are worried about suffering at every moment of the day.
You can start living as soon as you start focusing on all those wonderful opportunities that life is giving you and that you are letting slip by you now, just by being paralyzed by your fear of missing them. Enjoy everything, including the little things, because we do not know what is going to happen tomorrow. Think about the fact that no matter what happens, we each only get one life, so we have to make it count!