Life Advice: All About Change and How To Deal With Anxiety of Change

Change always happens. It has to, otherwise nothing would ever progress, regress, enter, leave, evolve, learn or exist. Change has to happen. However, just because it has happened for millenniums, sadly the human emotions have not evolved to make it any easier to deal with it when it happens.

When change happens, some people are able to adapt and become energised off it, whilst others dread change before it happens (anxiety) or find it so scary and difficult to adapt to that they cannot cope with it (depression, panic). I am the anxious type. I worry so much before change takes place. Once its happening I am ok but the days and nights that lead up to the event are horrendous. I will be unable to sleep, have anxiety attacks in the night and talk myself out of doing whatever I am worrying about. Even something that is meant to be exciting like going on holiday will unsettle me - New people, new routine, new places... It makes me want to stay put where I know what to expect and what will happen.

So change. Change can be categorised into a few categories: For the better; the worse; the non-differential and the future. Nonetheless, very few of us are fortunate to know which category our change falls under until it has happened. Changes can be little but personal, such as a change of hairstyle that increases the level of self confidence or change can be life-changing such as finishing school or moving house. But no change is insignificant... No matter how big the change, it will still affect you, even if it seems like something silly to another person who is lucky enough to cope well!

My advice on change is that it has to happen. If it doesn't, nothing would ever happen and existence would be extremely boring. The other point, is that it is totally normal to find change scary and difficult. One thing that helps me is to think of the reasons why you are doing it. Even write yourself a 'for and against list' to justify the change. For example,  I am moving away from home to go to uni, but I need to go to uni to get my degree. Keep your thoughts on the end goal. The other thing to try is write a list of all the things you are worrying about as a consequence of the change and rate them on a scale of 1-5 for likelihood of them happening. Then for as many as you can, write a course of action for the consequences should they happen.

For example, moving house:

- Noisy neighbours - likelihood 2 unlikely - ask them politely to limit the noise

- Disliking the area - 1 very unlikely - move again!

So that is my little talk about changes. I hope some of this has made you think and maybe these techniques might help you to control your stress during changes.

Please comment below with any thoughts, experiences or future ideas for my blog as I love to have your feedback!

Much love and remember, make a wish, take a chance to make a change!

Silver xxx