Anxiety is an emotion characterised by feelings of tension, worried thoughts and physical changes like an increased heart rate. People with anxiety usually have recurring intrusive thoughts or concerns, and may avoid certain situations out of worry, concern or fear.
So there we have it — the definitive definition. To you and me, though, it's just a bunch of words describing the fear and emotion that eats at you every day if you suffer from it. What it doesn't say is that, like any emotion, thought or feeling, it can be changed as easily as it was created. How do we manage that? That's the good part: you already have everything you need to work through this, so let's look at how.
Here's the first thing to remember: when we come into the world, we're born close to fearless, with only two built-in fears — loud noises and falling. Watch a baby: they're fearless, crawling toward stairs, reaching for plug sockets, putting anything within reach in their mouth. Everything else is taught, shown or learned along the way. Anxiety is one of the most debilitating of those learned responses, but it was taught and shown to you at some point too.
What's actually going on
The biggest player in all of this is the most powerful part of your mind: the subconscious. We take it for granted day to day, but it takes care of the majority of your thoughts, feelings and behaviours — it's thought to be responsible for the large majority of our thinking and behaviour overall.
The subconscious mind belongs to you and you alone, and everything it does, it does with a strong, positive intention behind it — it will never knowingly hurt or damage you. That includes the anxiety, worry and fear you feel. The intention is good. It's the behaviour it has picked to carry out that intention that's wrong for you.
For example: if you lack confidence because of certain beliefs about yourself, stored in your subconscious, you might start to feel anxious around people. That anxiety stops you putting yourself in new situations or around new people, which keeps you feeling safe and protected from being hurt. The intention behind it is genuinely protective — the behaviour it's using to deliver that is simply the wrong one for you.
So instead of spending hours upon hours in talking therapy, why not go straight to the subconscious mind and change the behaviour directly — rather than spending a lot of money on talking therapies and not feeling much different at the end? That's a decision you can make for yourself.
Many people arrive having spent a long time in talk-based therapy without much noticeable progress. Talk-based therapy does have its place, as every different type of therapy does, and every person is different and needs a different approach — if your predominant learning style is auditory, for example, talk-based therapy has a higher chance of helping you. But rather than talking everything over, and being asked to relive the negativity and re-experience the pain and turmoil that brought the problem to you in the first place, an alternative is to go straight to the subconscious and change the process and the behaviour directly, using NLP and hypnotherapy techniques that are tried, tested and proven to be highly effective in the majority of cases.
It's a bit like resetting your phone: you take away the unhelpful behaviours and go back closer to factory settings, where everything is simplified and easier to use and understand. In this case, that means identifying the limiting beliefs and behaviours causing the problem, keeping the positive intention behind them, and simply changing the behaviour itself. In a nutshell, it's about getting out of your own way, and removing the limiting beliefs and behaviours holding you back.
Happiness really does happen by change, not chance.
