With generalised anxiety it’s useful to remind ourselves of some of the commonalities we share with others and refocus on some simple truths of life. We can find it helpful and calming to accept some unquestionable facts and ground ourselves in their accuracy:
1) Fear is a mind killer
2) Anxiety is brain pain – it’s the signal saying, ‘Hey dummy, something is wrong! I am scared about the way things are going! Change course or I’ll make you feel even worse!’
3) Anxiety does not make us safer; it makes us unable to think clearly🤦♂️. Therefore when we are unnecessarily anxious we are more likely to be endangered by it. The irony.
4) All behaviour is positively intended – no matter how content-specific or destructive it may seem. Many heroin users seek warmth, many gambling addicts seek excitement and distraction. Anxiety seeks something too. What is the positive intention of your anxiety? Know that all worry is an upside-down positive intent in disguise.
5) A fear-soaked brain is not working to the best of its ability because the prefrontal cortex (front thinking part of the brain) temporarily shuts down during an anxiety attack and our amygdala is flooded with activity. If we are very afraid, we are in a state of pathological waking trance. Anxiety is a state of high suggestibility – we are easily programmed by danger. If you aren’t thinking, you are blindly reacting to whatever stimuli your environment (or the people in it) are feeding you.
6) The worst cases of anxiety-based problems are often found in people who have suffered from a maladaptive family environment in their formative years. Despite genuine individual genetic predispositions, we are still essentially products of our environment. The uncomfortable truth is that your environment is more likely the change you than you are to change it.
7) We all have universal human needs which need to be met. Any needs which aren’t getting met will eventually lead to persistent anxiety or other symptoms which act as signals to alert your conscious mind to the need for a course-correction. To get your needs met, you must take action. Paralysis, indecisiveness, confusion, stagnation (and comfort?) lead to a chronic lack of ease.
8) Trauma is so emotionally destabilizing because it violates our basic human right to have a sense of safety and security. Early trauma which is not attended to can persistently leak into lives for many years after.
9) The specific traumatic memories are not the real issue – it is the emotions associated with them that are the problem. Once you decouple the emotional trauma safely, the old memories are processed as normal unpleasant memories that we all have. A rule for life is that you should only experience a trauma once! This is easily said rather than done of course.
10) A de-traumatised mind can heal spontaneously without any obvious objective logic.
11) A brain that is not overly aroused is a healing brain. The same is true with the body. So many of us are over-stimulated in so many ways and yet often we seem surprised that our brain and body can’t relax. We’re either in fight or flight or rest and digest. Take your pick.
12) When we are heavily stressed our body acts as if it is under physical attack…. gut punch..bracing for impact, stabbing constriction in the chest, tense shoulders, muscular armouring…RUN!
13) Continual hyper-vigilance and false pattern-matching create paranoia. In this state, everything then activates your senses and your ability to accurately assess the sensory input and its ‘meaning’ expands too much, diminishes or is totally impaired – i.e., things get too loud or too quiet.
14) To feel secure and calm you need to have a firm grasp of reality as it is, not as you wish it were.
15) You can not live a calm life if you tell lies to yourself and others.
16) Keep calm and carry on was the best mantra ever created – absolute genius of the highest order!
17) Keep both good and bad stress within manageable limits. No extremes are healthy. A healthy life is a balanced life lived in alignment with self-generated values which you use as a foundation to build a meaningful experience.
18) There are optimum ways to respond to challenges and unhelpful ways!
19) 99.9% of worry is a huge waste of time and energy that changes nothing; it turns molehills into mountains and random meaningless thoughts into real life disasters that you must exhaust yourself mentally and physically preparing for.
20) Worry is a form of mental attack or torture that we perform upon ourselves. We wring worries to death, turning them over and over, strangling all joy from our lives.
21) Persistent and chronic extreme worry is the biggest cause of serious health problems; physical and psychological.
22) You must be comfortable with uncertainty or you will be swallowed into an abyss of hell on earth. Tolstoy said that the kingdom of Heaven is within us, well, so can the fires of hell.
23) You can not eliminate all your fears forever. Feeling the fear and doing it anyway is one of the best antidotes to anxiety. Courage is a muscle. The more you exercise it, the more it will grow 💪.
24. The more you try to suppress or ignore something the more intense and explosive the eventual reaction will be. Feelings don’t just disappear. Ignored and neglected emotions will eventually find a way to express themselves, often in surprising ways.
25) To get rid of fear, lose your fear of fear. A lot of anxiety is caused by the thought of being anxious, again…..anxiety about anxiety. This is probably the most common fear response in those with free-floating anxiety.
26) You can only take so much crap before something gives. If somebody is making you anxious, you are going to deal with it, snap or die silently without a fight.
27) A good night’s sleep keeps anxiety at bay and is probably the best cure.
28) In a fearful state we are highly programmable. Learnings (even the ridiculous) can be swiftly imprinted at the unconscious level. These learnings are rarely desired or useful. An example of this is if you tumble down a conspiracy theory rabbit hole in pursuit of ‘truth’, or you search google to find out about that pain in your chest. Rarely does this ‘research’ make you feel better in any way, shape or form.
29) Young mammals learn what is dangerous and safe by monitoring their parents/caregivers’ reactions. Humans are mammals too. Think about how the people who raised you reacted to the world and analyzed if you have simply mirrored their patterns of being.
30) The technical definition of what we call ‘learned helplessness’ is a habitual behavioural response pattern wherein any organism that is forced to ‘endure painful or otherwise unpleasant stimuli’ and thus, consequently becomes unable or unwilling to avoid subsequent encounters with those stimuli, even if they are escapable.
31) As an adult you always have a degree of influence. If you do nothing, you are choosing to do nothing! No matter how powerless we feel, we always have a choice from within our locus of control – no matter how limited it feels. Even in extreme circumstances, ‘they’ can take everything away from you, but the one thing that can never be taken away is your choice of how you wish to respond your interior life.
32) A relaxed brain can solve problems effortlessly utilising all available resources. We have a need to be calm to perform at our best 99% of the time. Fight or flight adrenaline might save your life in a real-life or death scenario, but misplaced anxiety will make you more stupid and less effective
33) To be anxiety-free you need good quality relationships. You need to eliminate all toxic people from your life and bring in all the life-affirming positive people you can!
34) You cannot be calm and at peace unless you live your life with self-generated meaning, not the meaning which is forced or expected of you.
35) Calmness requires self-determination and self-reliance. Humans need to have a degree of control over the outcomes they seek; if they do not have this, they become anxious in proportion to which their sense of control diminishes. A roller coaster is uncomfortable because it is unpredictable and has temporary power over our body though time and space.
36) Love soothes the human soul. Hate is a fearful emotion, and love really does beat hate.
37) Secure individuals are mostly found in large, active social networks and positive extended family groups – aka a circle of friends and family without drama, judgement, gossip and pressure.
38) If you want to stay calm, eat a clean, healthy organic diet as much as humanly possible. ‘We are what we eat’ isn’t 100% accurate but it is a good enough ideal to use to your benefit.
39) Rest, recover and meaningfully connect and given enough time, you will wave anxiety goodbye.
40) To feel happy and calm, humans need to feel there is more to existence than the mere struggle to survive; when this is replaced by materialistic nihilism, humans sicken. Are you a human or just another cog in an unforgiving and ungrateful machine?
41) A satisfied mind is not anxious. Anxiety is triggered by a fundamental lack of satisfaction.
42) People project their own limitations onto reality, so don’t be fooled into accepting everyone else’s bullsh*t.
43) We need both REM sleep and deep physical restorative sleep to feel calm. Too much or too little of either leads to anxiety and other conditions/symptoms.
44) You cannot laugh and be anxious at the same time. Try it.
45) To halt anxiety in its tracks you must interrupt its usual activation process, Literally, snap out of it with a behavioural pattern-interrupt.
46) When we do good things for ourselves and for others, we feel less anxious. Be kind to yourself.
47) Once we start staying at home because we are scared of the world, it becomes an addiction. The subconscious mind hates all change – even positive change that’s good for us. It wants total predictability and routine. It would prefer you grew up, lived, and died in the same property you were born in. Even if that means never leaving your house for the rest of your life. Sometimes you need to upset the apple cart and reject your ‘comfort compulsion’.
48. NEVER EVER LOSE YOUR SENSE OF HUMOUR. Don’t let the bastards take your right to laugh away from you! A humourless world is an unfree world filled with anxious mind-slaves who are confined to their homes and become very serious about their ‘problems’.