The Fear and Anxiety Solution (3 page)

    • Growing difficulties with work and relationships due to insecurity, doubt, and self-sabotaging behavior

    • Feeling paralyzed and stuck because of an inability to make decisions or move forward

    • Seeking distraction and instant gratification in addictive behaviors such as gambling, eating, sex, or work

    • Obsessive-compulsive behavior

    • Self-medication with alcohol, nicotine, or other drugs

    • Physical symptoms such as insomnia, high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat, chronic pain, and weight fluctuation

What can you do? You’ve all seen the commercials. The setting: a lively party with many happy, good-looking people. The problem: a young man standing alone—his face tense, his expression worried—and isolated from all the others, who are having such a good time. A narrator’s comforting voice says that you’ve probably felt that way before, too. And you think, “Of course I have—whenever I’m about to meet new people, or when I need to talk to my in-laws, or when I try to make a good impression at my boss’s party.” The soothing voice then says that a newly developed antianxiety medication can take care of your fear, depression, and isolation. The change is clearly demonstrated by the young man, who is now engaging in conversations, laughing, and seems very comfortable with himself. If a little pill can so easily solve your anxiety problem, doesn’t it make sense to take it?

Designed to relieve the symptoms of fear and anxiety, antianxiety medications are some of the most prescribed drugs in the United States.
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Every year people spend billions of dollars to escape these “unproductive and unacceptable” feelings with the help of pharmaceutical products. These drugs are so widely used that residues have even been detected in our drinking water.
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On our path through life, fear and anxiety can appear as a wall, and all our efforts to overcome these emotions can feel as though we’re trying to tear down that wall with a toothpick. Antianxiety drugs can then feel like the sledgehammer that is able to break down the wall. But are we treating the cause or the symptoms? In other words, is anxiety a physiological/biochemical problem that
needs to be resolved medically, or does it have deeper root causes and meanings that need to be addressed and understood in order for us to heal and grow?

You may have experienced your emotions, in particular fear and anxiety, as random, overwhelming, even paralyzing and utterly uncontrollable. Maybe you’ve felt stuck, discouraged, or frustrated with yourself, because, unlike you, all the people around you seem to have it together. Wouldn’t your life be much better if you could run it by logic and reason? And wouldn’t it be best if you could just turn your emotions off?

Generally speaking, our modern society has little room and patience for feelings. Reason and logic are far more accepted and valued than sensitivity and emotions. However, we need emotions for guidance and to bring meaning to our lives. They provide us with important information about our likes and dislikes, our strengths and weaknesses, and the value of our actions and choices. Every day, emotions have a significantly larger impact than facts and reasoning on the choices we make and how we experience our world. Isn’t it true that the moments we remember and cherish the most are those we associate with the strongest feelings?

Filmmaker Rick Ray noticed a paradox while traveling through India and other parts of the world to produce his documentary
10 Questions for the Dalai Lama.
The poorest people were frequently happier than those who seemed to be very prosperous. Ray encountered more smiles from those living in the slums than from the people who were privileged with a rather lavish lifestyle. Logically, it would seem that those suffering from poverty face the immediate danger of being without food and shelter; therefore, they have more reason to be anxious and fearful. But in reality, having very little can also mean that someone has very little to lose and more appreciation for the small joys in life.

Conversely, people who have spent most of their time and energy accumulating wealth or reaching certain external goals might identify too much with these aspects of their lives. As a result, their attachment to these possessions and achievements increases—as does the fear of losing them, which would also mean losing themselves. I am not suggesting that disposing of your goods and practicing an ascetic lifestyle will resolve your fear and anxiety and bring everlasting happiness. These observations simply underline that emotions, not facts or outer circumstances, determine our life experience.

The natural reaction to so-called negative emotions such as fear and anxiety is to try to get rid of them quickly because they feel uncomfortable and disempowering. But true healing is not about fixing or getting rid of a problem. Healing is about remembering and reinstating our wholeness. In this sense, negative emotions provide us with the opportunity to find and regain our wholeness. When we discover and understand their deeper meaning, they become powerful catalysts that lead us to our greater, self-empowered, authentic selves. After all, if fear and anxiety didn’t have an important function, wouldn’t evolution have eliminated them by now?

As you probably know firsthand, fear and anxiety can easily make you feel trapped and disempowered. However, it is not really the emotions that keep us stuck, but the ways we respond to them. Usually we don’t know what to do, we resist change, or we identify with the problem. Let’s look at these three issues further.

We don’t know what to do.
When we feel hungry, we know it’s time to eat. When we feel thirsty, we know it’s time to drink. When we feel tired, we know it’s time to rest. We understand the meaning of these sensations, and we know how to address them so they disappear. But what do we do when we feel anxious? We look for potential danger or go into the “what if” mind-set, preparing to fight, flee, or hide. We switch to fight-flight-or-freeze mode, because we often interpret anxiety as a sign that there is either something threatening outside of us or something wrong with us internally. By interpreting anxiety this way, we give greater validation to the feeling and freak ourselves out, which further fuels the emotion rather than helping us to understand its real meaning and address it appropriately.

We resist change.
One of the most common fears is the fear of change, which makes
changing
fear and anxiety appear even more challenging. Change usually entails leaving our comfort zone, which is why we perceive it as a somewhat uncomfortable risk. Comfort zones are created by our mind so that we can experience and engage with different aspects of our lives from a place of safety, familiarity, and control. The internal boundaries of a comfort zone are established by mental, emotional, and behavioral patterns and can be defined by the radius of our personal space, the emotional distance we keep, or by the degree to which we interact with our environment.

Our comfort zones differ greatly. Each one depends on how we feel about ourselves within the context of each aspect of our lives. For example, our
work-related comfort zone may appear small and rigid in comparison to the wider and more flexible comfort zone we share with our loved ones or establish during a vacation. Comfort zones are meant to be temporary and their boundaries flexible. As we’re growing and expanding and our beliefs and mental programs are shifting, we extend the boundaries of our comfort zones to adjust to whom we’re becoming.

In contrast with a healthy comfort zone, an anxiety-driven one tends to work in the opposite way. Its size decreases, and its boundaries become rigid walls. Anxiety morphs comfort zones into protection zones that shield us from that which makes us fearful and anxious. Our lives shrink as we perceive an increasing number of situations and people as unsafe and, therefore, something we must avoid.

At some point, we feel as though we’re no longer choosing the size of our comfort zones. Instead, our comfort zones control us and the size of our lives. A constricted comfort zone can be one of the greatest obstacles between us and positive change. The longer we stay in that constricted zone, the more we avoid and resist leaving it, even if we aren’t at all comfortable in it anymore.

We identify with the problem.
Fear and anxiety are especially problematic when they become a part of our identity. The moment we refer to ourselves as an anxious person or a worrier, we know that we’ve started to identify ourselves with these emotions. Anxiety becomes our emotional default setting, gradually restricting our choices and actions. This identification with the problem limits our self-awareness, which can diminish our ability to access our true potential to change, grow, and succeed. Eventually, we may even find it impossible to imagine life without anxiety. As a result, we believe that the best we can hope for—besides making it through the day alive and possibly unharmed—is to reduce the intensity of the feeling.

Sound familiar? The question is, what can we do to end our struggles with fear and anxiety?

This book is designed to be a personal guide to inner peace and self-empowerment. All you need for this process to work is the willingness to accept that fear and anxiety are not happening to you; you’re creating them inside yourself. Believe it or not, that’s good news, because if you create your emotions, you can also uncreate them.

To help you on your healing journey, you have the most powerful tool at your disposal—your mind. After all, it was your mind that created your emotions in
the first place. Your mind has the capacity to transform the wall of anxiety or fear into an open gate that leads to a place of new opportunities and unlimited possibilities. When you use your mind, getting better is no longer just about getting rid of these fears and anxieties. Instead, you can find and attend to their root causes, appreciate their true purpose, and embrace the wisdom and the power at their core.

As you go through this book’s highly experiential step-by-step process, you will gain the insights, flexibility, and strength you need to break through fear and anxiety. Each chapter provides you with practical and effective tools and methods to help you access your untapped potential and to create greater confidence, inner peace, and success. Since the chapters build on each other and form a cohesive program, I recommend working through this book sequentially to get the maximum benefit. However, you won’t have to wait until the end of this program to experience significant changes; they will occur along the way. Choose your own pace for this healing journey. Perhaps you’ll want to move rather quickly through the book to keep your positive momentum going. Or you may find some of the chapters especially valuable and want to take more time to practice the tools and solidify the results you have gained before moving on to the next step. Just keep in mind that the benefits of this book increase exponentially as you move further along in the program, and by the time you’ve completed it, the changes you’ve made will have transformed your life. So make a commitment to yourself today: commit to taking advantage of this program and changing your life.

Exciting, right? OK, you may feel some apprehension and even anxiety after reading this introduction. You may wonder, “What if I’m not ready? Or what if I’m ready but still fail? What if this is my last chance and I’m unable to use it? If I let go of fear or anxiety, what if I don’t like the person I become? Or what if I’m nothing—what if I’m empty without my fear?”

These are all valid questions that either will be answered in the course of this book or will feel completely irrelevant by the time you finish this process. Keep these questions somewhere in a corner of your mind, but remember: if our dreams and aspirations don’t scare us at least a little, they’re not big enough.

M
ANY BOOKS HAVE
been written about releasing fear and anxiety, finding more inner peace, and increasing confidence. So what’s unique about this one?

The insights and processes I share in this book address fear and anxiety from all the aspects and perspectives of your mind: the conscious mind (your intellectual and analytical capabilities), the subconscious mind (your emotions, memories, beliefs), and your higher consciousness, which represents the core of your being and goes beyond your thoughts, your emotions, or your body. Your higher consciousness is strongly linked to your true essence, which some may refer to as your spirit or your soul. To work with this part of your mind, you don’t need to be spiritual or subscribe to any religious belief. And even if you’ve never contemplated the existence of a higher consciousness, you’ll find that it’s quite easy and natural to connect with this part of yourself.

In my experience, all three aspects of our mind need to be addressed to break through fear and anxiety, get unstuck, and create profound and permanent change on the mental, emotional, energetic, and physical levels. The good news is that when you’re working with all these aspects, you move forward and change much faster than if you work with just one or two levels of your mind—and your healing is more complete. You gain a new foundation of confidence and trust in yourself to live and express who you truly are—a self-empowered, self-reliant individual.

Sounds great, but how do you leverage the powers of your conscious mind, subconscious mind, and higher consciousness to achieve optimal results?

This is where the five principles of change come in. Following these principles enables you to utilize the powers of your entire mind and consciousness to address and heal the deeper root causes of your anxiety-related challenges. The principles are
awareness, flexibility, choice, actualization,
and
readjustment.
They are all incorporated into the exercises, tools, and processes throughout the book and provide you with a structured, logical pathway into the wisdom and healing power of fear and anxiety and help you reclaim your innate potential to change, heal, grow, and thrive.