Anxiety happens when you perceive danger in your immediate environment, or predict future stress in your mental environment :-) So in your mind. it doesn’t matter whether the danger is real and now or imagined and future. These problems tend to happen more to intelligent and sensitive people who have a much greater prediction ability :-)

With anxiety, your body prepares to “fight or flight” and so all the changes your body makes are to be in the best state to safe your life from whatever the “danger” is. So you become very jumpy — hyper reactive, your peripheral vision is more sensitive, you notice every little sound, every tiny movement around you. Blood is diverted into muscles and away from digestion, you have more energy available. And logical thinking is suppressed and reactivity heightened.

We evolved in nature, and so these instinctive reactions were perfected in a totally different environment to the one we now find ourselves.

Just like almost all health problems, the solution is to learn to live right and think right. And that always means a multi-pronged strategy of good habits that make doing those good things easy. You mentioned meditation and exercise which are fantastic and powerful. Also, we have good nutrition, sleep, being organized to get rid of worry, tidying your soul so that wrong ideas don’t lead you up the garden path etc. So you can see how powerful it is to make all these good things into good habits, to change your focus of ATTENTION from playing around with mental stuff that doesn’t matter and that will grow into a monster to focusing on the powerful causes of health and happiness.

Hope and promise? I would say that you deserve happiness, it ain’t so hard with the right focus, and that happiness is ALL YOU WANT.

~Mike

I have been having anxiety attacks and unwanted thoughts for over 10 years. Ever since I was very young. I am soon going to start my first session in therapy but I am still nervous.

I used to always be scared of having something severely wrong with me. Some people like me would maybe be afraid of having a heart attack, cancer, seizure etc But not me, mine has always been about mental problems. I would be afraid that I was “going crazy” and that these feelings were merely the first stages of insanity. Although the realistic side of my brain tells me I don’t, it’s not enough to fight it.

I have always had thoughts of hurting myself at a young age and it would torment me for hours. Then as I grew older my brain evolved to think about hurting others. I personally blame a lot of media for being the catalyst of my fears but what can you do…it’s not like I had any way to prepare as a child to embrace positive thoughts as I was bullied at school and experienced deaths in the family while young.

I became riddled in it when I had my first real exam in high school. I think it was because I was trying to concentrate on important things even though it was impossible due to these debilitating thought patterns.

It felt like I was addicted to my anxiety! I got this rush out of feeling bad. I would feel overwhelmed and then out of the blue it would vanish and the warmth would return to my hands and feet and my mind would settle. The feeling of it going away would be such a relief that I got “high” from it. But over time, I got sick of it dictating my life so I studied my own self to try and find a way to help myself…

So, to make a long story short I basically changed my mind to not be so much absorbed on the internal (which was truly scarier because it wasn’t an obstacle easily overcome) and to focus on the external (life stress, bills, friends, health, etc).

Now I do believe in the power of the mind. After all it is a tool our body uses to perceive the world. And I think we are taught we are just to accept the fact that we have little power over our minds…but I know, from my own experience, that attempting to fix yourself is better than doing nothing and letting it dictate to you.

One of the things I do is keep putting things off like meditation and exercise. Which I know will greatly help me. Sometimes it’s just so hard to feel the energy midst all the chaos.

So are these disturbing thoughts and feelings part of something worse or is it just simply another symptom of anxiety to feel convinced that something is wrong with you?

Also, could you give us some possible psychological symptoms of anxiety so we can better relate with each other?

Thank you so much.
And I still have a lot of hope and promise!

Yes very much a prison when we believe that our thoughts are us, that our thoughts are true, and all our attention is sucked in and we can’t stop… or a nightmare. Yes, you’re doing the right thing “in the moment” to ignore them and soon, you won’t need to keep saying “haha there’s Nigel’s prison again” although for a little while it can help. Just SEEING these thoughts as garbage is all you need, having the right attitude, then removing attention.

No thought should be taken on face value. Believing garbage can create hell, as you know. Thoughts aren’t true/untrue inherently, they are what you say they are, they have the quality you give and they come back with that quality. So you can see that what a child believes, can create heaven or hell their whole lives, because the “truth” of a thought was instilled so early on, its truth isn’t questioned. We can take on as identity whatever the world labels us, so easily.

Meditation will improve your ability to be in a step back position, to not be sucked into to habitual thinking, to see thoughts for what they are. And also, you should look to your make sure your body, and your biochemistry are right — nutrition, sleep etc.

And then there’s taking care of worries, dealing with them so you don’t have unresolved problems disturbing you.

There are very few, as yet, “remedies” out there that are effectively getting to the roots of problems. Your psychologist has given you good advice, but it’s not the whole picture. The true remedy is always a multi-pronged one; dealing with unwanted thoughts in the moment yes, but looking to our whole way of being, living and thinking to get to the roots of chronic problems.

Our culture and education systems are seriously lacking very simple wisdom on how to live and think right, and all of the immense suffering in the world, including yours, is the result. That’s a tragedy and needs to change. ASAP.