To overcome your anxiety you need to learn how to break your automatic and habitual cycle of fear that keeps you stuck. By now you know what the cycle is and how it’s all playing out inside your mind. The trouble is, it happens very quickly and can easily become automatic behavior that occurs without any conscious thought.
What’s critical for you to realize, is that in between the thought that causes your amygdala to react and your fear response, is what I call “The Pause”. There’s a measurable time period, maybe not a long time, perhaps only a second, but a definite moment in between the anxious thought and your reaction. One of your goals is to learn to increase The Pause and give yourself room to make a decision about what to do next, instead of simply reacting with anxiety just because that’s what you may be used to doing.
This is especially important because what you’re USED to doing about your anxiety is usually WRONG! Remember, anxiety is really just an instinctual response to a threat that isn’t really there. Because of this, what you’re drawn to do automatically as a means of coping with or stopping the anxiety actually has the opposite effect - making your anxiety worse and more severe!
Let’s look at something you probably do now when you get anxious and see if it’s helping or making you feel worse... You’re going about your day and all of a sudden you get anxious, afraid, or feel a panic attack coming on. What’s the very first thing you do?
You try to push it away. Talk yourself out of it. You try to suppress your anxiety.Understand this...you CANNOT hide from or suppress your fear. It’s impossible and the fact that you’re reading this is evidence that it doesn’t work. If you could simply choose to shove your feelings out of your head you wouldn’t still be having a problem with your anxiety, right? You can PRETEND your anxiety isn't there...you can choose to act in spite of it, but that isn't suppressing it because nothing has genuinely changed. It's like when you go to someone’s home for a meal, sit down at the table, take a big spoonful of what they cooked and realize it's terrible. You can put on a happy face, tell them how wonderful their version of chicken ala′ king is, but underneath, you KNOW it's bad and want to spit it into the napkin. You can suppress the outward reaction, but not the inward REALITY. Your feelings of anxiety are no different. You can put on a happy or brave face and pretend you’re not feeling afraid, but inside, YOU KNOW. False suppression and getting better at pretending everything is going swell isn’t what you need to focus on, instead, you need to discover how to stop the process that causes the fear before it begins.
Of course suppression is just one faulty and ineffective anxiety control technique that’s frequently used, there’s many more and some that not only don’t work, but actually make your anxiety and fear grow more rapidly and spread into other areas of your life. I discuss those in more detail in my full programs you can read about at the end of this report, but for now, I want to talk a little bit about two important concepts that you can use to help make whatever treatment you’re involved with exponentially more effective. You’ll also be able to use what you’re about to learn as a basis for evaluating whether or not the treatment approach you’re using will be something that will help you when you need it most.