How To Stop Anxiety Part 3

In this article I want to discuss why anxiety is not an illness and why talk therapy is generally an ineffective treatment for Anxiety, Panic Attacks and Phobias.

The first thing we need to understand about anxiety is that it is thinking about what you do not want to have happen. This had a powerful survival benefit for countless generations of our ancestors. The ability to think about the future enabled humans to take preventative action. If you could imagine the coming winter and imagine starving and freezing to death you could do something now to make sure that didn't happen. You could dry meat and berries and store them in underground containers. You could make warm clothing from furs. You could travel to a lower elevation or warmer climate.

So thinking about what you do not want to have happen in the future is not all bad. The people who didn't have this ability generally perished. The people who did have this trait passed it on to us.

The next piece we have to understand is that some people seem to "do" anxiety "better" than others. One of the curious "ah hah" moments I had in my private NLP/hypnosis practice was the first phobia client I worked with. He was extremely intelligent, creative and sensitive. And in the years since, I have never, ever met an anxiety or phobia sufferer who wasn't.

It dawned on me that one of the reasons I love helping this group of people is that I can totally relate to them since I suffered from all the same thing. As a songwriter I literally developed a phobia about putting my work out into the public. I could get up on stage but usually I made my self sick and then anticipated a negative reaction.

Now the prevalent opinion in the psychological community is that anxiety is a "disorder" and needs to be treated with drugs and therapy.

The truth as I see it (and I know this may be controversial) is that anxiety is thinking in a certain way. The body then reacts to the imagined reality as if it is reality. Change the picture. Change the focus. Take charge of the unconscious process and make it conscious and anxiety and phobias can usually be eliminated in less than a single day.

Let me explain this a bit more. As I discussed in my previous articles, Anxiety is thinking about what you do not want to have happen. Usually the person doing this makes the picture big and bright and close on their internal screen. They then vividly imagine the absolute worst thing happening. they then repeat it endlessly and anchor the process to certain situations or places or people.

To use the example of the woman who had a swimming phobia and a lot of anxiety about it, all she has to do is hear the word "swimming" or "pool" or "deep water", or "boat" and it triggers her memory of nearly drowning. She then imagines drowning in the future and her body reacts with all the fight or flight chemicals and hormones as if it is really happening.

I can do the same thing if I imagine meeting a lion. I have to stop myself from imagining being eaten by it. Now I have never encountered a lion but our ancestors have. It may be right there in my genetic code. So I can choose to imagine the lion ripping me to pieces or I can imagine climbing up into a tree to safety. Being able to imagine the worst guides me and hopefully keeps me from walking out alone on the African savanna at night.

Do you see how this is a powerfully creative process? It's the same process that happens when an artist envisions a sculpture forming from a slab of rock. Or to use the example of scuba diving. The man at the restaurant who was sharing his excitement about scuba diving had as many positive internal representations as the woman had negative ones. So he thinks "Scuba" and he imagines floating weightlessly in the quiet world under the surface. He has a picture of shafts of sunlight reaching down into the turquoise blue tropical water. His body starts reacting to the ecstatic memory as if it is really happening and it responds as well to his anticipation of his next joyful adventure beneath the waves. So he feels good. She feels bad.

Now let's go to a typical talk therapy session. Imagine the woman with the swimming phobia. She's supposed to talk about it. In order to talk about it she has to imagine it again. So as she talks she is reliving the drowning event in the past and she is living the possible drowning in the future. Her body is reacting as if it is actually happening. All the while she is looking at the therapist and hearing the therapist's voice and connecting the therapists office and perhaps even the time of day with the anxiety and phobia.

The more she talks about it the worse it gets. After a few weeks all she has to do is think of her therapist and what happens? She starts reacting they way she used to react to just the word "swimming."

In part 4 I'll share with you one of my best techniques for stopping anxiety fast. (Follow the link at the bottom of this page)