Anxiety Can Be Right. How It Helps With Challenge
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Focus
Stress and fear are always going to be a part of our lives. But what role does it play, and just how important could it be?
Summary
Anxiety has a role to play, but it can become out of balance like all things. When it’s in balance however it creates a positive effect known as “toughening up”.
- Anxiety and fear create powerful and positive impacts on our body and mind,
- When unbalanced it becomes “too much of a good thing” and where it’s supposed to protect it now harms,
- When we face it, we experience a positive outcome known as “toughening up”
Anxiety Plays It’s Part
At Risky Kids we teach that fear plays an important role in the balance of risk and challenge.
- All feelings, including fear and anxiety, are valuable,
- Overcoming fear is what makes courage possible and the challenge worthwhile,
- Anxiety improves our performance and awareness when it’s in balance,
Facing down a challenge always takes courage. It’s not about being fearless but managing our fears in order to achieve our goals. This is what we teach Risky Kids! More importantly we teach them that all of their feelings are valuable.
Fear and anxiety have very real roles in our lives. We should never seek to extinguish them, because it would firstly mean there’s no accomplishment in overcoming them, and no way to grow from facing them.
Balanced Fear and anxiety also help to sharpen our minds and bodies, triggering a range of positive responses which improve our performance, letting us work harder, think faster and even feel better! Most of all, fear and anxiety protects us from real harm when we listen to it.
Too Much Of A Good Thing
Like all things though there can be too much of a good thing. Balance is key in risk, and when it’s unbalanced we see serious problems.
- There are rising levels of mood disorders,
- Anxiety when unbalanced lessens our experiences,
- It can feel natural to turn away from anxiety, but we shouldn’t.
We’re seeing growing and growing levels of anxiety at clinical levels in young people, and no matter its benefits when it’s out of control, anxiety creates more harm than good.
Anxiety will cause us to miss out on important moments in our lives, to avoid situations that could help us grow, turn us away from relationships just because they’re hard work and make use retreat behind bubbles of constant comfort.
We can’t turn away from anxiety though. It can feel natural to avoid situations which make us, or our Risky Kids, feel anxious, however this leads to dreadful downward spirals which turn into anxiety disorders as we become less and less familiar with these feelings and less capable of managing them.
Toughening Up - Our Psychological Armour
At Risky Kids we help kids to face challenges, not just to grow their bodies but to grow their minds.
- “Toughening Up” is a powerful mental process,
- Healthy challenges result in adaptation,
- We can also develop personal strategies to overcome challenges,
There’s a remarkable process which occurs when we expose ourselves to stress and anxiety called “toughening up”. We didn’t make this up, it’s real! It’s where our brain chemistry becomes more resilient and balanced when experiencing anxiety, lessening its impact.
The more we expose ourselves to healthy levels of challenge which trigger small emotional responses, the more our brain and body can learn to recognise and balance these experiences.
Besides this process, we also learn to develop and deploy strategies which we can use to navigate challenging or stressful situations. We can arm ourselves with offence and defence to take anxiety and use it for its intended purposes instead of letting it control us.
Conclusion
We need anxiety, it helps to power our growth and to face challenges. But we can’t let it control us, and we absolutely can’t be afraid of it. We must learn to navigate and wield it by challenging ourselves the right way.
Richard Williams
Risky Kids Founder, Director of Programming
Richard Williams is a fitness industry consultant, gym owner, business coach and professional stunt actor with more than a decade of experience in the health and fitness industry. With an education in psychology and criminology, Richard blended life experience as a fitness industry consultant with Spartan Race, gym owner, elite-obstacle racer, ultra-runner and professional stunt actor to create the Risky Kids program.
Richard has a passion for enacting meaningful social change through all avenues of health and wellbeing and believes that obstacles are the way. Some of Richard’s key achievements include:
- Key consultant/coordinator Spartan Race/Tough Mudder/Extreme Endurance
(Australia/NZ/Global) - OCR World Championship Finalist – Team & Solo (2015)
- OCR World Championship Silver Medallist – Team Endurance (2018)
- Professional film and television stunt performer for 15 years
Considered one of Australia’s foremost experts in the fields of fitness, wellbeing and behavioural science, Richard is frequently in demand as a guest speaker for relevant government and non-
government bodies and organisations. Speaking engagements centred on the success of the Risky Kids program, philosophy and approach have included:
- Expert speaker/panellist Sports & Camp; Recreation Victoria and Outdoors Victoria forums
- Closing expert speaker at the Australian Camps Association National Conference
- Expert speaker at the National Fitness Expo, FILEX
