Helpful Advice About Your Anxiety

A lot of websites that focus on anxiety will talk about medication, hypnotherapy, counselling, and such like as the recommended forms of treatment for anxiety.

I prefer to use the word “traditional” treatment in the sense that “that’s the way things have always been done”.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not knocking the medical profession here nor any of the other therapies used to treat anxiety. Each has a place in its own right and should not be dismissed out of hand.

Similarly, anti anxiety medication can be very helpful to alleviate distressing symptoms in the short term. Nobody can dispute that. However, treating just the symptoms does nothing to treat the actual anxiety.

From personal experience, I’ve learned that the only way to move on and progress in life is to treat the cause of your anxiety, not just to deal with the symptoms.

The anxiety habit can be deeply ingrained in us. Some of your negative thought habits were possibly learned long before you learned to hold a knife and fork. So they have been with you for a long time, and your Inner Guardian mind has very strong self-preservation reasons for not changing.

So be prepared for your journey to take a while. Nothing is going to "cure" you overnight, but every step you take towards the positive will help you.

You need to unlearn the negative thought patterns and reactions that are causing you so much trouble

. . . and start to unlock the stored negative emotions locked away inside you.

The old, negative, thought patterns that have brought you to your current situation need to be replaced (or ‘recorded over’) by new, positive thought patterns and you can do this in the privacy of your own home.

It won’t be instant. You probably have many years worth of negative thought patterns to record over but each small step you take leads you closer to the calmer, happier life that you want.

Doctors, therapists, friends, advisors, etc. can all help you, but the real change comes from within you. The journey is yours to make.

By all means, read self help books, listen to self-help tapes, be open to any sort of help but also learn to listen to your own intuition. The whole process is about communication with your unconscious mind.  

Trust your intuition and if a particular therapy or therapist, or meditation exercise feels wrong for you or you are really uncomfortable with it, then avoid it.

 It is your thoughts that cause your anxiety.

Engrave that sentence on your memory and you’ll be well on your way to recovery!

Every time you think “What if such and such happens?” or other similar worrying thoughts you are giving your body the signal that you are in danger. Your body then dutifully responds (because its mission is to ‘protect’ you) by making the ‘fight or flight’ response kick in.

You then experience this as anxiety or panic.

But most of the time there is no real danger. The only danger is the one that you’ve just conjured up for yourself in your head! So, in effect, you have brought the anxiety on yourself.

The way to recovery is to firstly recognise how these thoughts are causing you problems. Then you need to start taking control of your thoughts. You’ll probably find this quite difficult at first, especially if you don’t really believe that your anxiety is under your control.

So observe yourself over time.

Start to gradually accept the fact that you have an anxiety disorder and acknowledge that this is in no way a bad reflection on you as a person. Instead of dwelling on your problems, try to find out as much as you possibly can about anxiety. Knowledge is power! The more that you know about it, the less fearful you will be about it and the less of a hold it will have on you.

You must also learn to accept your anxiety. This includes your panic attacks as well. Being fearful of whether anxiety may happen to you means you’re once again buying into the Fear – Anxiety – Symptoms cycle.

By letting the panic happen (in a way, giving it ‘permission’ to happen) instead of trying to fight it each time, you’ll be surprised at how its hold on you loosens more each time.

By accepting that anxiety or panic might happen and then allowing it to, you will have completely bypassed the ‘fight or flight’ response. And without that automatic response, you won’t have those dreaded anxiety symptoms.

Doesn’t that sound amazing?