Thirteen subtle habits that quadruple your anxiety (I’m being serious)

Alex Mathers
4 min readApr 22, 2024

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I suffered from anxiety (hard) and still have my moments. That’s fine. It isn’t about never having anxiety — it’s about making peace with reality.

Ultimately,’ anxiety’ is a label we’ve made up to describe the physical experience of stressful thoughts. It needn’t be a big deal, but we make it so.

Here are ways we make it worse:

1. Making ‘anxiety’ your identity.

You’re not an ‘anxious person.’ You just have occasional anxious feelings. Your identity as an ‘anxious person’ is cementing your suffering for life.

Most people use anxiety as an excuse for their failures.

Drop the victim bullshit and wake up. You’re stronger than that.

2. Taking your dumb thoughts seriously.

Here’s the reality of being human: we will continually have all kinds of thoughts, negative and positive, arising in us from now until the day we die.

We can’t do anything about this. We can, however, let go of the need to latch onto every thought that floats up.

We hook in because we buy into the seriousness of thoughts.

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Alex Mathers
Alex Mathers

Written by Alex Mathers

Helping you develop a consistent writing habit with impact. Regular tips: https://www.masteryden.com

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