Overcome Anxiety With Self Therapy [continued]

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Often when a person starts to feel an uncomfortable feeling like fear or anxiety, the initial reaction is to avoid it - either its internal sensation or its external cause. The person may not even realize that they are avoiding something or know why they are avoiding it, since many such reactions are triggered by subconscious associations. When acting in this way, it's obvious that fear is in control.

And when dealing with anxiety, avoidance is just what you don't want to do. If you try to suppress anxiety, ignore it, run from it, or distract yourself with other activities, you're only giving anxiety power. Remember, fear of anxiety creates more anxiety. The key is to confront it, feel it, and accept it. Now that you know panic attacks are just a normal adrenaline response, there's no reason to fear it anyway. And also don't try to ignore the symptoms... Even if your heart feels like its pounding out of your chest, just feel it. No matter how bad it is, the key is to face it. The more energy you put into feeling this episode, the less strength it will have to affect you the next time. In a few moments we'll perform an exercise that will present a more complete approach, but for now know that acceptance and awareness of inner sensations is the essence of Self-Therapy "listening".

Once you've gained confidence in your ability to handle any feeling, you will have eliminated the fear of feelings that causes agoraphobia and panic disorder. Knowing this, you can quickly prevent anxiety from turning into panic.

Emotions like anxiety exist essentially as energies within our bodies. Most likely you've never given much thought to what feelings really are. We use language to place labels on emotions like "happy, sad, angry, nervous, anxious, jealous, fearful", but these are just labels or symbols of the actual energies. For the duration of this course, think of emotions as the energy or essence underlying the feeling. Using labels or words to symbolize emotional energy is useful for communicating with other people. But you connect with yourself by listening directly to the pure label-less energies within.

Your relationship with yourself is a unique one in that you are the only person whose inner world you can ever really know. Learning to observe and listen to your energies is the key to your relationship with yourself. The identification of pure energies within is a major component of Self Therapy. Learning how to concentrate awareness on your energies is the "listening" aspect of the process, and it has tremendous ability to expand your emotional tolerance. When you increase your tolerance, adverse energies lose their power over you and you regain control over your inner world, of which your outer world is just a reflection..

You'll find that by identifying the energies underlying anxiety in your body and observing them as entities, you will be able to overcome the majority of their debilitating effects. Once you can observe an energy objectively as an "entity" and accept it, you have moved from being consumed and controlled by the energy, to simply feeling the energy. With repeated practice, you eventually reach a level where the feelings, such as fear, are no longer dominating your thoughts to the point of influencing decisions. You can experience the energies of fear or anxiety with "comfort", and continue acting in a confident and constructive manner despite their presence.

Don't worry if some of this explanation seems confusing at this point. Self Therapy is really a simple tool, and you don't need to completely understand the underlying theory in order to make use of it. Just like you don't need to know how an engine works in order to drive a car, you also don't need to be an expert in these principles to reap the benefits of Self Therapy. Review these concepts later if you wish, but for now let's move on to some practical instruction.

NEXT PAGE: The Self Therapy "Anxiety Treatment"