I am convinced there is no worse hell than extreme anxiety and chronic worry - you can feel like you're strangling to death, even like you're about to have a stroke or a heart attack.

According to Dale Carnegie, author of How to Stop Worrying and Start Living, the hospital beds are filled with people who have developed life threatening illness when worry and stress was the root cause. After all, the word disease is Latin for a "lack of ease".

Not only can it make every muscle in your body tighten up like a guitar string, and cause your thoughts to kidnap your mind and senses from what's in front of you, there is no sympathy or understanding from others since they can't see a physical handicap.

Very often I hear, "why do you have anxiety, you have a great life."Well, there is no reasonable cause for it - there is nothing to fight, I can look out my living room window and see a sun drenched lawn, and all across the Straight of Juan De Fuca to Victoria - yet my mind can't take it in - it's been arrested by a mind that is trying to swallow the world, and all the images of stress and anxiety that occur in some distant corners of the world and are than broadcast on TV.

Since it has been proven that debilitating stress can kill you, how do you combat it. Well, my anti anxiety medication Clonazepam certainly helps, but I believe it is mostly simple surrender that is needed, which sounds easy but is hard. Simply letting go is like the feeling of letting go during a roller coaster ride as a kid, when you would throw your arms up in the air and let the carefully designed coaster do the work for you. For deep inside, at your core, is your body's ability to be calm and relaxed. Ironically though, the more you try and achieve it, the greater the stress increases.

Letting ones thoughts drift, like a river or stream, can allow your anxiety to float away with it. Allow the panic attempts to come - the racing heart cannot kill you, for your heart races faster playing a sport or tread mill. The more you let it pass, the more your mind will realize that the fight or flight response is not necessary. You can imagine you're on a haunted house ride, or watching a scary movie - you feel the fear, but you're in no danger.

Think of a cat, it allows itself to just be - no desire to improve itself, just accepting its role in nature and being a part of it. If it needs anxiety or anger if a fight comes it's way, its natural instincts will induce the necessary fight or flight response to prepare it for the fight. However, once it's over, it's gone, with no desire to ruminate or ad any of its own meaning to it.

You are just like the cat, a part of nature, and a perfect reflection of it. Everything else that is the source of your worry is an artificial construct, and the conditioning that you need to be worried to be responsible comes from years of conditioning from public schools, the media, and maybe even your parents.

As the great modern philosopher Allan Watts once said, "trying to smooth your thoughts and worries is like trying to smooth a creek with a flat iron. It can only be smoothed if left alone." Just be here, now - your body and past conditioning will struggle against it - just endure it. In reality the future doesn't exist, and the past is gone - there is only now and that's all there will ever be.

When your mind and body resist the urge to just be, just allow it to struggle - it's the only way for the anxiety to come out. When it reaches your consciousness, your mind will naturally let it go.

Also, equate relaxation with success - the most successful people are the most calm. They see reality for what it is, and it's only a calm, sill mind that is left alone that will reflect reality accurately, much like the smooth, placid surface of a lake or pond gives the most accurate reflection.