Step 1
There is nothing wrong with you.
I think one of the biggest hurdles that people initially have to overcome is there’s a huge judgment that there is something wrong with you. There isn’t. If you think something’s wrong with you that is the first step to leading you down a path in which your chances of success are decreased.
How you choose to label and perceive this moving forward really dictates how your healing process happens and where you go on that healing process. Instead of thinking that there’s something wrong with you it’s better just to look at what’s happening inside in the mind and the body and just label the mechanics of what is happening.
Step 2
Understand the mechanics of what is happening
If you repeat a thought over and over again it will start to build up an energetic charge in the body. If you keep obsessively thinking about something with a fearful outcome, it builds up so much that it energizes the thought to the point that it feels real even if its not. Eventually the charge builds up to a point that is higher than your will powers ability to manage and the emotion overtakes you. You are no longer in control of your actions even though the thoughts that cause the anxiety are still yours. So in terms of mechanics, it’s just a repetitive fearful thought that builds up enough emotional energy in your body to the point where you loose control. Over time the thought repeats so much that it continues to run as a program in the subconscious mind, continuing to build up charge without your awareness. This causes the physical symptoms of anxiety.
Step 3 – Its not about stopping the anxiety, it’s about you giving your power away to the anxiety.
The thing is, if you let that fear get the better of you, you have given power away to the idea which has caused fear in the first place. This is the next hurdle to overcome. How much power you let your anxiety have over you. Anxiety is just another emotion on the spectrum of emotions like grief, anger, joy or excitement. Nothing more, nothing less. So you have to look at how much power you’re giving away to anxiety. Every day you decide you do not want to face your fears is just another day that you give a little bit more of your power away to the point where you feel helpless to do anything about it. There is a huge lesson here in terms of self-empowerment and taking your own power back and building confidence in yourself and your ability to manage and navigate life. This is a very important mind set to have.
Step 4 – Breathing exercises
Let’s just move into some some techniques and tricks to help you diffuse the anxiety and settle your body and your mind down and retake your power. The prime way that helped me was through meditation. There is a strong connection between your breath and your mind. Whenever you breathe shallow repeated breaths through the top of your chest, your mind is automatically going to speed up and you will feel symptoms of anxiousness coming on. Whenever you breathe slow deep belly breaths and slow the breathing down for a period of time your mind will automatically calm down. This does take practice and it does take time so be patient with it.
The mind controls the body, the breath controls the mind.
A breathing rate of four or five breaths a minute for about 15 to 20 minutes is really going to settle the body down quite a bit. Here is your practice:
six second inhale, six second exhale
or
four second inhale, four second pause, four second exhale, four second pause
Either one of them are fine. These should be relaxed breaths so don’t force it. If they’re too hard for you to do, you can bring the time down a bit on each of them. If you bring your breathing down to four or five breaths a minute for 15 to 20 minutes daily and consistently practicing that, you should be able to learn to still yourself. It will take a few months but as a regular practice this is probably one of the most fundamental things that anyone can do to sort of help bring their mind down and bring their body back to center. Once you’ve practiced this for a little bit the next thing to do is to when you feel the anxiety or the panic coming on is to then go and do your breathing practice when that happens. You want to do this because you want to start to learn and observe the different sensations that you’re feeling in your body as it happens.
There’s a certain level of progression of sensation as the emotions gets higher and more intense.
With anxiety the progression is:
hesitation
doubt
restlessness
agitation
nervousness
worry
anxiety
panic
With each of these levels there is a specific set of physical sensations that will manifest for you. How it presents in your body will not be the same as someone else. If you can learn to be still enough to feel the sensations at the level of doubt or hesitation than it is much easier to cope with and face at that level before it grows to anxiety or a full on panic attack. When you feel the early onset of symptoms, focus on your breathing and you can usually (with practice) regain control and move on.
Once you get to the level of anxiety it can be difficult to breathe away the symptoms. In this case the best tool is exercise. Channeling the excess charge that has built up in your body into movement is a great way to burn that off. Going for a walk, hike, bike ride, swim are all good options. Any movement that is lower intensity and longer in duration works best.
Once it gets to a full-on panic attack there’s so much charge in your body that you don’t have any control anymore so it’s best to just let it happen. Remind yourself of what is happening: the body is discharging excess energy. That’s it. If you judge yourself too harshly for having a panic attack then that feeds into the powerlessness of the situation and will only make it worse.
Once you have an idea of the early warning signs of anxiety coming on, start to pay attention as these sensations arise when you go into different situations. Over time when these sensations come up, learn which situations you’re able to handle or if the sensations get too much and you have to walk away.
Step 5 – Build Awareness of fearful thoughts
The next step is to start paying attention to what thoughts are associated with the sensations you are feeling as they arise. This can give you key insights as to what beliefs are creating the anxiety in the first place. Then you can cut off the build up of the energetic charge in your body at the source.
Learn to hold your center when you deliberately choose to go into situations that make you uncomfortable. This is key. You have to go into these scenarios and to face whatever it is that you’re worried about but you have to do it at a level that you’re comfortable doing. There is a pattern of avoidance that feeds into anxiety and makes it worse. You must break this pattern.
As you continue to do this it is important to build confidence in yourself and disbelieve the idea that is causing the fear. Repetition helps build success. This will continue to diffuse the charge that is building up in your body.
Step 6 – Present moment practice
This is a powerful way to overcome anxiety because you will find most of your anxieties are about things that have not happened. Anxiety causing thoughts generally have the theme of being about some future event.
The present moment practice is just stopping and breathing and looking around and noticing the discrepancy between how your thoughts are drifting off into the future and how that is so terribly disjointed from what what is around you in the present moment. It seems simple but this is very profound. Witnessing a direct experience that is in opposition to what thoughts about the future are spinning in your head crack through the illusion of anxiety. It’s not about suppressing the thoughts, it’s just about not letting them control you. As you go throughout the day you can actually notice these thoughts as they arise and just let them pass without having any control over you. See how your mind spins into fearful thoughts for a bit but don’t pay too much attention to it. Notice it, go back to your breathing go back to your center and the thoughts will disappear on their own. Then another thought will come up and this this will continue to repeat. This is how you start to learn to detach from your thoughts and get your power back.
The more you can repeat small victories over time, the more it can build your confidence, the more you can believe in yourself. You can have a mantra for this if you want when you are going into situations where you are facing nervousness, hesitation, doubt or a little bit of anxiety.
As you breathe and center yourself say to yourself “I got this!”or “I can do this!” “I believe in myself!” “I can do anything i put my mind to!”
This helps build up a charge in your body that is in direct opposition to anxiety.
You never 100 percent eliminate anxiety. It’s just an emotion it’s like any other emotion. To eliminate anxiety you would have to get rid of all emotions. If you do that you are no longer human. The way to cope with this over the long term is to build that self-awareness and know when you’re in doubt or hesitation. That’s when you deal with it before it builds up. Keep your awareness so in tune with your center of being that you can recognize the doubts as they first arise and deal with it at that level.
The longer you do this the more you actually start to change your frame of mind permanently.
Your perception changes so when fearful thoughts arise you can recognize it’s just a situation that i don’t believe in myself and you need to address that by facing and embracing it. As you repeat going into situations that make you nervous and coming out just fine, your confidence builds up and you learn:
The antidote to anxiety is confidence.
If you can get to the point where you believe in yourself and you can handle any situation that comes your way then you have finally learned the lesson that anxiety was there to teach you.