Anxiety Education
If I am going to someplace or going to do something that I feel nervous about, I have certain odd routines that I have developed in order to assuage my anxiety; for example, lets say I am going to a high stakes interview, I will get to the interview site a half a hour before early and just walk around the block a bunch of times. For some reason this calms me. One of my Grad School Professors, Professor Rose recently shared that he has his routines in order to deal with the anxiety of teaching. In our society, I believe people think that if people have anxiety about something it must be because they are not good at it or do not have experience doing it. The Prof. Rose example illustrates that even talented people with years of experience can feel anxious about doing something they have done successfully many times before. One way for students to better manage their anxiety, may be to explicitly discuss in class that having anxiety is normal part of being human and that having routines/rituals in order to manage that anxiety is normal as well. I think it would be an interesting assignment to give students to ask them to find someone who is very famous and successful as an actor, athlete, politician, scientist, writer, or any other field and try to find out if they have any routines or rituals that they do to deal with their anxiety. The video below is an example of what I would show to a class. It is of recently retires professional baseball player Nomar Garciaparra. Garciaparra has literally thousands of hours of experience hitting a baseball, yet before each time he tries to hit he goes through an elaborate routine of pulling on his gloves and sleeves, tapping his toes, moving dirt around, and swinging his bat around. He does this exact routine in between every pitch. In his career he saw over 10,000 pitchers which means he did this exact elaborate routine over 10,000 times!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGfYwkxYENg&feature=player_embedded
Here is another video with various NBA players doing strange routines at the free throw line most likely as a way to manage anxiety:
Useful information like this one must be kept and maintained so I will
put this one on my bookmark list! Thanks for this wonderful post and
hoping to post more of this!
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Education is important to understand and stress that you have feelings why. This is an important emotional issue as a way of normaldaily routines can be annoying. Emotional problems, but they vary wildly, it is also a source of poor physical health.
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Anxiety is such a common problem in our world. Still there is not much written on the subject. The world needs more education on the subject. Thanks for a great post!
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