Angst has been the muse for many a creative – perhaps most famously in Edvard Munch paintings, but also the torchpaper for Mitteleuropa poets and in more recent times, the headline to a film about understanding and managing anxiety https://angstmovie.com/.

As regular fans of plans will know, here at Make Me A Plan we are fascinated by the link between personal and professional lives. In this fortnight’s blog, I want to isolate the types of angst I believe the modern human is most prone to experiencing, how this affects our work and home life, and some practical coping mechanisms to challenge angst when it clips its pincers around you with increasing regularity.

ANXIETY

Angst’s principal strand of DNA, anxiety, doesn’t exist when we are born. We begin to identify the concept as we grow in to society, and most of us will experience the symptoms at some point.

We’re quite well accorded to counting our steps, being aware of how much water we hydrate ourselves with, how many portions of fruit and veg we do or don’t ingest each day. We also inhabit a world where there is a growing awareness of mental health and destigmatisation of mental illness. However, how many of us is familiar with, tuned in to those concepts, but not making the obvious lateral connection and monitoring our anxiety levels?

How often in a day do you furrow your brow? Clench your jaw? Clench your fingers? Tense your back? Purse your lips? Physically slump or retreat? Pick at your fingers or fiddle with your grip?

If your mental anxiety levels are manifesting themselves into any of these physical cues, suggest to yourself a familiar method – simple counting perhaps – to track how often these anxious gestures feature in your day, so you can assess what level you’re at, and what level you’d like to be at.

DREAD

Completing the helix of hell angst-wise, dread is common parlance in everyday phrases, but when it actually intrudes into our everyday lives, is truly pervasive.

That all-consuming feeling that things are just too unmanageable, that you are viewing a shadow of your former self or an idolised other who would have been able to cope with the situation that is filling you with trepidation.

Dread occurs when your perception is out of kilter with reality. All horizons seem morbid when infiltrated by dread’s creeping fingers. You can’t bear the thought of a certain deadline or meeting at work, having a conversation with someone in your personal life, or even just holding your head up high.

When angst is the first thing that greets you in the morning and pervades the rest of your day (and often your night too), what can someone do to combat this?

The first thing to note is that angst is a master operator and plays on weaknesses. The twin terrors of anxiety and dread develop in a bacteria-like fashion, feeding from their host and multiplying until they are tackled.

If you are in the grips of angst and feel nervous, unhappy and incapable, it’s all very well to say these feelings need to be addressed, quite something else to be able to enact this.

Fans of plans will know that Make Me A Plan specialises in different approaches to positively changing our behaviour.

This is one of my prescriptions for altering your relationship with angst…

Have a positivity day.

Set out to confound your synapses, just for a day and always repeat back (out loud or in your head) a positive counter to any negative thoughts that enter your head. NOT just when angst or dread pay a call, but any time your automative response is negative.

NB this includes people cutting you up on your commute!

Move the goalposts.

If you feel like everything is unmanageable – maybe it is. Cancel appointments and meetings that aren’t urgent. Reassign tasks on your to do list to another date or even the one-day wishlist. Give yourself a break, because, as we’ll return to in future editions, your body is your team-mate.

It’s a wonderful life.

Really, it is. And we each have one of them. Even if it sounds ridiculous and you believe this 0 or 1% of the time to start with, stating mantras like this to yourself is part of the counter-offensive to angst. Angst wants you to be at its mercy and chip away at your life’s potential.

You must be a solider of the resistance, not a prisoner of war.

Try these techniques, in this order, and let me know what difference they make.

I’ll be musing On Security next fortnight – get in touch with any particular aspects of that topic you’d like me to write about.

Happy Planning.