Exploration of these two feelings
As the idiom says:
A picture is worth a thousand words
I wanted to explore Anxiety and Excitement/Enthusiasm through pictures first.
Anxiety
It hurts just to look at this picture. You can feel the pain he is in, it is a very lonely picture, his eyes are closed and the person is stuck inside himself. There is a lot of tension in his face, his eyes and even his hands seem tensed.
All these thoughts on his head is an unbearable weight, in another picture there were elephants on the head. Generally, the head is downwards, like there is resignation about the situation.
You can also feel that there is confusion, there are broken thoughts – many unsolved questions, and eventually there is doubt, “will I ever be able to move out of these thoughts?” It results in a feeling of being frozen: anxiety is often a lasting emotion, the person is going through his day with these unsolved questions and doubts attached to his head. This stillness creates then a sense of nervousness, I can’t move forward but I should, “how can I move out of these thoughts?”
In Wikipedia, Anxiety is defined as an emotion characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil, often accompanied by nervous behavior. It is the subjectively unpleasant feelings of dread over anticipated events.
It differentiates itself from fear, which finds it source in the present dangers whereas anxiety is always linked with expectation about something that will happen in the future. In Wikipedia as well, the focus is put on the overreaction between the objective threat of an upcoming situation and the subjective emotions it generates.
As much as anxiety in its extreme case can be seen as a psychological disorder, everyone has experienced it one day or the other. Any unknown situation will usually trigger some sort of anxiety, like in my two previous examples: a new job and/or new assignment in another country, a professional outcome that is completely new or from the need to decide – anxiety of choice or decision (Wikipedia, s.d.). In this power tool I intend to cover these latter type of “everyday life anxiety”.
Excitement and Enthusiasm
When I googled Excitement, one point struck me first. When I went through Anxiety pictures I only came across adults, whereas when I started to look at excited faces, almost 50% of the pictures where kids and babies. A nice reminder to me that while growing up we tend to forget our natural ability to be excited and marvel about daily life experiences.
I invite you to take a moment here and think back to an event in childhood where you found yourself excited about a situation. What was that situation? Can you remember how that feeling of excitement sat with you? How did you perceive it physically and emotionally?