480: How changing your thoughts about anxiety can help you heal

Today we're talking about how our thoughts and feelings about anxiety affect the quality of our life.

We'll be looking at the benefits of clearing resistance and resentment towards anxiety, and how that frees up our energy to start taking action steps toward feeling less anxious and more hopeful.

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Notes from this week’s show:

The Thoughts that keep us stuck in anxiety

Some thoughts we often hear are:

"I will never be free from panic attacks!"

"I know I'm stuck with this anxiety for life."

"I've tried everything and nothing works."

These are beliefs, not facts, and beliefs can be changed. Freedom from anxiety begins when we challenge those beliefs and look beyond them.

Breaking through the anxiety wall

When you see anxiety as an enemy or personalise it by saying you hate it, you are giving anxiety power over you.

It becomes something you have to fight, or you resent. Feeling this way about anxiety puts you in a victim mindset. You are feeding your anxiety and exhausting yourself.

We’ve all done it. It's the default setting of a suffering mind. You don't like how you feel, so you declare it. I hate this. I don't want to feel this way. But anxiety isn't personal. It's not listening and it's not going to back off and leave you alone - unless you make the choice to deal with it by taking action.

Two challenges for the anxious mind

The mind tends to form grooves. Like an old record, our thoughts carve tracks that our mind falls in to and plays over and over again.

The mind also has a negativity bias, which means it's particularly drawn to unhelpful thoughts and beliefs and likes to replay them and ruminate on them.

This replaying makes the grooves of negative thought even deeper and more difficult to escape, but we can, with determination and support.

Changing our mind is easier when it comes from our heart

Changing the way you feel about your anxiety and switching your perspective to seeing it as an emotion, or a messenger that is trying to communicate something to you is a positive first step in regaining your power and sense of control over anxiety.

One way to do this is to ask yourself what would I love to do if I was free from anxiety?

When you practice looking for purpose and meaning in your life, anxiety becomes a hurdle between now and what you want to experience instead of a brick wall.

Using EFT Tapping to change unwanted thoughts

Tapping is a quick and effective way to change our unwanted beliefs and, in doing so, change your entire experience of anxiety from feeling trapped to feeling hope and finding freedom.

You can try it by yourself via a book or course, or work with a practitioner for support and to make sure you cover all the aspects of the issue. Tapping for our beliefs about anxiety is a very interesting exercise that can key right into calming general anxiety.

The way to master anxiety is to stop fighting it and start taming it

This begins with paying attention to what’s beneath the roar of your anxiety.

When you look at a raging river you see the white foamy water on the surface. That’s the part that gets your attention because it’s showing the most energy, noise, and movement. But if you think beyond the surface, you know there is more to the river than its rushing and roaring.

With anxiety, we see the surface noise and turbulence, and we get caught up in it and become exhausted. But there is more to it than its surface symptoms and looping thoughts, our anxiety also has a story, a source and different elements to it. There will be things that provoke your anxiety and things that help calm it. It's not static. The mind likes to think anxiety is solid, set in stone, but it isn't. It's moveable and it can be influenced and tamed.

Getting curious is an important shift that helps us look into our anxiety for more information and, with support, we can begin working with that information and responding to anxiety’s message.

For a deeper exploration of taming anxiety and freeing your mind, we invite you to take a look at our our New Beginnings Course which is currently on sale at 30% off with the coupon code: newyear

Thanks for listening to Anxiety Slayer. Wishing you all the best in the days ahead! Shann & Ananga