First, we must provide a disclaimer, we are in no way medical professionals and this blog post is for informational purposes only and does not seek to be medical advice. If you have a medical situation, please consult a medical professional.
Anxiety is a bitch! I know it, you know it, we all know it. There is something about that persistent, intense, excessive worry that compounds your mind and suppresses your physical body. The physical body seems to take the blunt of the manifested anxiety and it is as if a 100 pound weight is suddenly added to your chest.
This experience is scary. It can cause real physical symptoms like rapid heartbeat, excessive and nonrhythmic breathing, sweating and fatigue. It can and will interfere with your life, work, relationships, school and your typical daily activities.
If you are reading this you are probably hoping that I can provide some magic answer that will help you overcome anxiety? I will be straight forward and honest, there is no magic answer. Although, there are things you can do!
See to overcome something, we must first strip it of its power over us. We have to unmask the unknown. Fear comes about from our emotional attachment to pain. Ultimately, we only experience two fundamental emotions. They are pleasure and pain. So when something that is undefined enters into our subconscious mind we tend to associate that unknown with pain by default. This is evolutionary. It is a defensive survival mechanism that we developed ages ago so that we would be cautious and on guard entering into an unknown environments.
In today's world we have less need for this type of subconscious program. So the first step in overcoming anxiety is understanding that-
1.) Fear is a defensive subconscious program developed to help us survive. It is attached to the emotion of pain and only exists because we have not defined its outcome or expectation.
Your understanding from something comes from your current perspective and your apparent paradigm. By bringing a foundation of understanding towards that which appears unknown we unveil its mysteries which also remove the shroud of its weakness.
So what causes anxiety?
This is a good question.
Anxiety can come on at moments you least expect it and also it can build with anticipation and explode inside you with immense power. Although it grows inside of us and manifests within us we can always trace it origins to something external to us.
In my practice and with over 25+ years of experience studying and researching the mind one thing I have learned is that who we are is made up of four unique states of existence. I simply call them your spiritual, mental, emotional and physical bodies. The emergent state that comes about through their interactions and with themselves and their external reality is what I define as a mindset.
This will be more important later but is a good starting point for understanding how our physical and emotional body work together. When we interact with our environment we are exchanging energy. It is a relationship. I doesn't matter if it is a tree, air, a person, animal or a car. We have a relationship with whatever we interact with. This area of interaction I call your Primary Level of Influence.
This is an area that you can immediately and directly influence with any action.
In our society and culture we have what I would call a fairly saturated Primary Level of Influence. See this level works both ways. It you are not influencing it, you are being influenced. Our four bodies developed in this type of environment for millennia and through evolution they have organized the defense mechanisms to protect the overall being.
When energy is exchanged within this area of influence it first interacts with your physical body. Your physical body interacts and immediately associates the relationship as either pleasure, pain or undefined, which as we know, defaults to pain.
As the energy exchanges it now must pass through our emotional body. Our emotional body is the filter that stops unwanted energy from entering into our being. When energy interacts with the emotional body it triggers what we call "micro emotional responses". These can be subtle or with an intense experience they can be powerful.
So one thing to think about is this. Energy just doesn't dissipate. It doesn't just disappear. It has to go somewhere. So if our emotional body is a filter what happens to the energy that it blocks, that it lets through?
A good analogy for this is to think about food. If you eat food your body will consume it and transform it into something useful. If you do not eat enough, you will be deficient and get sick. If you eat too much you will get fat and sick.
Energy is energy.
As we exchange energy we also transmute that energy into different useful forms.
So what if we did not know how to transmute that energy into different forms?
Or lets say we have a low energy metabolism and we just entered a highly saturated environment that is bombarding us with various micro emotional stimulants. What happens?
If for some reason we are not able to transmute the energy in our emotional body then just like excess food our bodies store it. It gets stored first in the emotional body but after time your emotional body become saturated and the excess energy seeps out into your physical and mental body. In my opinion and many others this is the cause of all stress, anxiety, sickness and disease.
So how does this excess storage of energy that saturates our emotional the cause of anxiety?
Think of it this way. The energy is raw in form and wants to seek a balance. It does not want to exist in a state of excess. So it continually seeks opportunities to "burn the fat" so to say. The fastest, most efficient and effective way to do this is through instinctual and evolutionary pathways that are built off of pain and pleasure.
As our environment bombards us with micro emotional stimulants, eventually our emotional bodies encounter a threshold. This threshold has to release the energy somewhere. So it finds a pathway polarized by the environmental trigger, associates to pleasure or pain and releases a massive amount of energy. When this massive amount of energy releases it can overwhelm the physical and mental bodies because that is where it release into. Immediately the release of energy causes a panic and fear because our conscious mind does not understand what is happening.
Welcome to anxiety.
So now we know what it is and how it comes about. How the hell do we get rid of it?
There are few things to keep in mind. Sometimes it is just an emotional channel that is overloaded. Not necessarily the whole emotional body. This could be caused by something like a trauma, injury, abuse or even something that is not negative like immense joy, happiness or compassion.
This is where mindset comes in. Remember that mindset is the emergent state that is created when all four of our bodies interact together and with our existential reality. A little secret for you is that this state of mind is controllable. You have absolute control over your emergent mind. It is simply a choice and a discipline.
To begin we need to build what I call a reminder system or a system of mental analysis in our mind. This simply is a constant reminder to your self that "if something happens then I do this." The reason for this is that we want to understand what causes reactions in our mind. Remember that undefined outcomes associate with pain. So if an external event triggers an emotional response this is most likely because we have yet to define that trigger in our mind or that we associate it with pain.
So the second part of overcoming anxiety is-
2.) Build a system of identification and analysis in your mindset. We call this Identify, Analyze, Rationalize and Visualize.
Ask yourself, "Why am I feeling this way?"
What was the trigger that just caused this?
Why did that trigger produce this emotional reaction?
Write these answer down in your journal or notepad.
You want to rationalize this experience. We are trying to unmask the saturated emotional channel inside of us that was just triggered.
As your experiencing this anxiety take control of your thoughts.
Identify, Analyze, Rationalize and Visualize.
Identify - Come up with some questions of identification. Here are a few examples.
What was the environmental trigger? What was the feeling? Do you have fear? Why?
Analyze - You want to analyze this experience and truly understand why it is causing this anxiety. Unmasking it will release its power over you.
Ask yourself- "Why did this experience cause this trigger? What from my past is associated with this experience I just had? Why am I afraid of this? What is unknown? What are the expectations I felt before I experienced this? What feelings were built up in anticipation?
Rationalize - This is where we want to uncover the saturated channel. By rationalizing the experience we define it. By defining it we can now discover its limitations. This gives us control over it and eliminates the fear. If you know your enemies weakness now you can take the offensive.
Visualize - This is where we want to create a story in our mind of expending the energy. This is the first step to transmuting energy.
Develop a mental visualization of the emotional filtering process. Understand that the anxiety you are experiencing is excess energy being released. Let go of the fear and attach this association to pleasure. Create a movie in your head to play out the expenditure of energy. Imagine yourself in the act of primal pleasure or in the experience of your passion. The objective here is visualize the transmutation of the energy as you experience it. Give your mind a pathway to get rid of it. This changes the associations with the external trigger and rewires the pathways and starts associating the energy flow with pleasure.
We have outlined very simple Mindset Development process to overcome anxiety. There is one more part to cover, although it is simple to understand. Change does not happen immediately. It comes about over time. This needs to be implemented as a practice. You might not get it right the first, second or even the third time. That is ok. The objective is to become consciously aware of how your mind is "reacting" in this process. If we can do that, then we can train our mind to "act" differently towards those experiences.
Ultimately, our primary objective should be to develop a practice of emotional cleansing. Our bodies are bombarded with so much crap these days from our external world that it becomes fairly easy for our bodies to become saturated and overloaded. Here are a few tips to start offloading the excess energy that is stored in your body.
-Develop a work out routine
-Go for a walk, hike or bike ride
-Meditate and visualize excess energy flowing into the ground
-Eat a whole foods diet
-Develop a Daily Reflection Practice where you review your day in your mind and let go of the experiences you no longer need
-Have more good sex. Visualize energy flow during them and imagine the excess energy being burned in the fires of your orgasm.
-Attach the excess energy, emotion to word. Write them down and release them. Speak, shout them to the world. Write a blog or do a vlog.
Interested in learning more?
About the Author -
Joshua Reid is a Mindset Coach and Business Consultant focusing https://www.dynamicmindsets.com/joshua-reid
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