Anxiety and worry are common. In fact, almost 1 in 5 people are noted to suffer from anxiety each year which means that in any five year period each of us is likely to have a period of anxiety. I think these numbers are artificially low. You see, you are here today because of anxiety and worry. It’s evolution.
Imagine thousands and thousands of years ago our distant relatives were walking around the jungle, savannah, or around Pride Rock or similar and they heard a sound. There were two possible responses. One is to say, “oh, it’s probably just a squirrel or the wind”, and to keep walking. The other response is to jump and hide because it must be a lion or some other horrible predator.
If it was just the wind or a squirrel the ancestor who hid feels embarrassed. However, if it was a lion the one who didn’t hide got eaten and disappeared from the family tree.
Today, we don’t honestly have too many things worth worrying about. None of us have a high likelihood of being eaten by a wild animal, dying from exposure to the cold, or getting killed in a raid by a neighboring tribe. Yet, the worry genes persist and so we need to find things to worry about. So how does this tie in to what we do here at TSC, well did you know that Botox, Xeomin, Dysport, or Jeuveau may help reduce anxiety and help you feel better? It’s likely because our mood is so closely related to facial expressions like fear, anger and sadness. So Botox basically stops the muscles from making those frown lines and helps calm us. When you can’t make angry frowns, you may become happier and less stressed.
We worry about what someone meant in that text to us. (Was it nasty or am I misinterpreting it?) We worry about not finding a parking spot. We worry about spilling coffee in the morning on the way to work. None of this is truly worth worrying about but we can’t help it. When you worry about something just remind yourself it’s because of your highly successful ancestors who were able to survive true hardships, because unlike you they didn’t have access to these neuromodulators, like Botox, Dysport, Jeuveau, and Xeomin.
Give thanks and realize it’s probably better to have anxiety about nothing than to actually have lions after you.
