Today I want to share with you how to stop anxiety in 10 minutes or less without harmful drugs or endless therapy.
Would that be something you might be interested in learning how to do?
I mean, if you’re anything like me you may have suffered from anxiety all of your life. And once I learned this one technique, though it wasn’t the only one to learn, it really helped me a lot to clear anxiety.
And so I’m going to share it with you if that’s OK…
The experience of anxiety
All right, so when you’re experiencing anxiety what really is it?
Now, if you’re experiencing anxiety are you thinking about, I don’t know, blue skies and fluffy clouds, and cute kittens and puppies? And are you imagining loved ones home safe and sound?
Are you imagining that the person you’d like to get to know a little better wanted to get to know you better? Are you thinking about getting that raise? Are you thinking about finishing that public speaking gig to thunderous applause? Are you thinking of arriving safely at the end of your journey?
No… you’re not.
You’re thinking about what you do not want to have happen.
Anxiety is thinking about the future and vividly seeing what you do not want to have happen. This process enabled our ancestors to plan ahead and take action to avoid freezing or starving to death during the winter.
With a phobia or a trauma you are thinking about something that happened in the past. Just like when you might have accidentally put your hand on the burner of a hot stove.
Your mind makes a powerful vow to watch out for that and avoid it in the future.
So if you think about what you don’t want to have happen in the future your Unconscious Mind reacts AS IF those nasty events are actually taking place in the present moment. If you think about what bad things happened in the past, again, your Unconscious Mind perceives it as happening now.
Thinking about the last panic attack you had (the past) and worrying about when the next one might happen in the future creates a powerful, negative double whammy that sends fight or flight bio chemicals coursing through your bloodstream.
This is a very clear example of the Mind/Body connection.
Your body reacts to your thoughts of danger as if the danger was real. Watch the video for an example of this. The mind and the body are interconnected. Your body responds to your thoughts, pictures, self talk and focus…
You’re thinking about the worst case scenario.
So ultimately this very simple thing is one, one piece of the puzzle. Anxiety is not a disease. It’s not a mental illness. It’s simply thinking about what you do not want to have happen…
How to clear anxiety
What we’re going to do now is we’re going to do the anxiety technique and I have a couple of little diagrams for you so you can kind of follow along.
And the first thing you’ve gotta do is you’ve gotta imagine your life in a timeline. You’ve got to imagine, uh, there being the future. For many people the future goes out to one side or the other. Usually to their right.
For other people the future is out in front of them.
Whichever way it is for you really doesn’t matter. Now, as you think about the future, as you think about something that you were anxious about, something out in the future, what I want you to do is I want you to float up above your life and imagine your future stretched out below you on a timeline.
And I want you to float out above the event about which you thought you were anxious, and stay nice and safe, high enough above that event and look down on the event as an observer.
And now, here’s the key.
Go 15 minutes farther out, 15 minutes farther out after the successful completion of the event, and turn and look back, seeing everything resolve in a perfectly positive way.
All right?
So go ahead and do that.
Go ahead and float up above your timeline. Stay up nice and safe. Go out to the event about which you thought you were anxious. Go 15 minutes farther out and turn and look back down onto your timeline. Turn and look back and see the event turn out, as I like to say, better that you could possibly imagine.
Now, now where is the anxiety?
Hmm?
If you’ve done this correctly, it’s either remarkably less or it’s gone altogether.
Pretty cool, huh?
So come on back to now. And in a future article I’m going to share with you how you can tweak this one technique a bit more, how you can make it even more powerful for you.