At first I was going to call this “How the Internet Helped Me Overcome Anxiety.” But I decided what actually helped me overcome the anxiety I had in certain situations was visualization.
I stumbled upon a great anti-anxiety technique by accident. I used to be a white knuckled driver going through the mountains of Kentucky and Tennessee.
I have some bad memories of going through those mountains as a kid on vacation in my parents car. Of course those were the old mountain roads, much more difficult to navigate than the modern interstate highways, but the anxiety always plagued me.
We don’t travel by highway for long distances generally now; we usually fly. But we did a road trip when my son was 16 to Florida, and another one just last year to NYC to help him move. Mountains. Both trips.
But I found that when I was traveling to Florida several years ago I started to zone into a more relaxed mindset, imagining that all these cars where actually people I knew… friends I had not yet met… but who I talked to on my favorite message boards on-line. I found myself assigning names to the cars. Each car seemed to jive with a personality that was familiar, and so we became, in my mind, a little traveling community on the highway.
I was no longer white-knuckling. The world now seemed to be a friendly place, not hostile! I relaxed, my anxiety gone! This worked so well that on the trip to NYC I actually drove the lion’s share of the mountain highway through Pennsylvania.
When I shared this with a friend recently, she told me she does the same thing at Toastmasters when she is speaking. She mentally puts her friends in the seats and enjoys chatting with a group of “imagined” familiar faces.
The mind is an amazing thing. Sometimes a little visualizing or a little re-framing can make a world of difference in personal comfort and performance.
Filed under: Personal Growth, Toastmasters, Travel, positive thinking
