How we became anxiety slayers and how you can too
In this week's podcast we are sharing our own experiences with anxiety and how we learned to overcome it.
Points covered include:
our own experience with anxiety
lessons learned
favourite tools and strategies
Ananga's experience with anxiety:
One of the toughest challenges in dealing with anxiety is the feeling that you are swamped by negative thoughts and emotions that you can’t control.
You might find yourself worrying about something bad happening to yourself, or a loved one, or a normal situation turning into a disaster. It can happen day or night and your body can’t help but respond to the projections of your mind.
You can tell yourself these awful thoughts are unlikely to come true, but anxiety knows how to make friends with your imagination and together they can create such a complete picture of your worst nightmare that you can’t help being dragged along for the ride.
For years my mind projected the most horrible scenes. I would be fine one minute and then in an instant my stomach would churn in response to some imagined terrible thing happening to someone I loved. The speed and the detail with which these nightmares would invade my mind was shocking.
Thinking back, my mind has thrown this number on me since I was a child. Sometimes I felt I had worried over something so much that I had paid a toll that things would be OK for a while. And then I went through a time when my mind caused me to suffer so much I began to feel exhausted about reality and impending disaster. I was punch drunk from going through it all in my head, over and over and I wanted to be able to take my batteries out and just stop functioning. Stop thinking. But I always knew that wasn’t possible.
Help came from an unexpected place
Relief came in my fascination with psychology and Ancient Indian Literature. I found comfort in the teachings of the Bhagavad-gita, and I started practising meditation. I began studying NLP, hypnotherapy, meridian psychotherapies including EFT Tapping, techniques for coping with trauma and I fell in love with Ayurveda (India’s 5,000 year old science of life).
I wanted to know how to control my mind, and I was interested in learning how to help others overcome extreme stress and trauma so that they could live their life in peace.
It took me a long time to get it - but now I do, I'd like to save you some time
It took me years to understand how simple it can be. To understand that it is anxiety and it’s sweeping drama that makes it so hard for us to seek relief in basic tools that will, with practice, reign anxiety in and help control and contain fearful thinking.
If your mind is throwing the stuff of nightmares at you, please know that you can learn to control it. The mind is a restless and unruly thing but if you feed it peace and develop the awareness that you are not your mind and that your intelligence is above your anxious thoughts you can begin to experience relief and peace.
We have created a support pack called the Anxiety Rescue kit to help you when you feel lost or overwhelmed in trying to manage anxiety. It contains the information and techniques I wish I had known 20 years ago.
photo credit: remember (145/365) via photopin(license)