Summary Of Anxiety: Challenge By Another Name By Collier

Accept anxiety as another name for challenge and you can accomplish wonders (Collier 96). This is such a powerful statement because not only does it possess hope but it turns the word anxiety into something positive. Many people experience the kind of anxiety that holds them back from doing something that they desire. Collier shared some different situations where he experienced that kind of anxiety in his essay “Anxiety: Challenge by Another Name.” In this paper, I will discuss the three valuable rules that Collier learned through these experiences.
Collier’s first rule is “do what make you anxious: don’t do what makes you depressed” (Collier 94). What lead to his first rule was a time when he was in college and turned down his roommate’s proposition to visit a ranch out of the country in Argentina. Before turning down the invitation to Argentina he went through stages of questioning what it would be like in another country and he made excuses in his head of why he could not go. After saying no to his roommate Ted, Collier later experienced feelings of regret. For instance, this made me think of a time
Collier always saw Ellington as a very confident man so when he learned this he was shocked. Therefore, Collier asks himself “who was I to think I could avoid them” (Collier 95)? Learning this about Ellington helped push Collier to do those frightening interviews with some significant named people until one day he realized that the anxiety experience before the interviews had almost gone away. This lead to his second rule, “you’ll never eliminate anxiety by avoiding the things that caused it” (Collier 95). To put it another way, “if you put an individual in an anxiety-provoking situation often enough, he will eventually learn that there isn’t anything to be worried about” (Collier