“That the birds of worry and anxiety fly over our heads, this you cannot change, but that they build nests in your hair, this you can prevent.”

~ Chinese Proverb

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Dealing With Anxiety For Teenagers & Young Adults

If you are a longtime member of this service, you know that I always try to choose quotes that provide us with some wisdom or perspective that can help us create our experience of life in a more purposeful way. I have chosen this quote because I believe that it can help us understand the nature of thoughts (especially thoughts based upon worry, anxiety, or fear) and, most importantly, can help us make choices about how to deal with these thoughts most effectively. For example, in this little Chinese proverb, thoughts of worry, anxiety, and, thus, fear, are described as “birds” that may at times fly over our heads.

This is a wonderful description of how thoughts seem to fly into our consciousness from out of nowhere. In fact, I’m sure that we all have had the experience of finding ourselves thinking and then feeling something that we never “intended” to think or feel. While this can be confusing at times, I’m going to suggest that this isn’t really the problem. In other words, the fact that certain types of thoughts might fly in and out of our consciousness is not something we need worry about, for to do so would be the equivalent of allowing these fear-based thoughts to “build nests in our hair.” (I love this image because it so clearly speaks to how a thought can attach itself to our consciousness, make itself at home, and go about the business of reproducing.)

Of course, these “thoughts” are not entities, and thus do not have the power to “build nests” and multiply, however, we do have the power to capture them, and breed them, until our mental space is full of cages…and crap. This, in my opinion, is what we are doing when we try to deal with life, or make decisions about who we are and what to do based upon thoughts of worry and/or anxiety, and it’s why it doesn’t work. Unless the situation calls for a fight-or-flight reaction, then thoughts of worry, anxiety, and/or fear will not serve us in dealing with it successfully.

So, what can we do when we notice that these sorts of thoughts are flying over our heads? The same thing we do when we notice that birds in which we have no interest are flying over us in the sky… let them go, or quite literally “don’t give them another thought!” and instead begin looking for thoughts, beliefs that serve us as we go about the business of creating our experience of life. In other words, I’m suggesting that we not worry about thoughts of worry, or feel anxious about thoughts of anxiety. Instead, we should be very purposeful about the types of birds (thoughts/feelings) that we pursue, for you see, it is the thoughts that we choose to find, feed, and follow that will determine our experience of life!

Therefore, the real question is what are the types of birds (or thoughts) that we are looking for? Crows or hummingbirds, vultures or doves? Once we have chosen the type of thought that we believe to be valuable, we are then free to find, feed, and follow it, while ignoring all others. If a thought happens to fly through our consciousness that is incongruent with the experience of life we want to create, we can just let it go and replace it with a more purposeful one. Then, rather than our mind becoming an aviary for whatever type of thought happens to be flying by, we can become watchers and appreciators of a very specific kind, species, or classification of thought on which to build our lives. We will then be free to take wing with the thoughts of love, appreciation, and purposefulness, and maybe even become someone who is able to inspire others to “soar” as well.

Take care and God bless, Dr. Bill