A Simple Explanation for Anxiety and How to Process it

But why is it so difficult to do that? Well, when I'm telling, when I'm working with people, I usually, this is what I tell them. You're sitting there, you're watching this video. Now, imagine for a moment I'm anxiety, and my job is to make you feel anxious. I hope watching videos like this doesn't make you anxious, but bear with me for this exercise. So you're watching this, and I'm anxiety, and I'm going to make you feel anxious. How would I do that? Well, this is how anxiety works. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to throw a thought at you. That's just one thought. Now, it's going to be an anxiety-provoking thought, something fearful, probably about the future, something that you feel you can't handle. Then I'm going to go away for a while. Now, as anxiety, I've left you alone with the thought that I've given you. But now I'm a bit worried because as anxiety, all I want you to do is feel more anxiety. So I'm thinking to myself, okay, I've got a problem here because I've left the thought over there with them. But if they actually sit down and inquire about that thought and look at that thought, that one single thought that I've left with them, I'm in trouble because there's a good chance that they might see through it and realize there's nothing to worry about here. So what I do is I come back as anxiety, and I'm going to throw three more thoughts at you, maybe five more, and a few more. And sooner rather than later, you know, you're feeling this thing of what I call fog. It's like a brain fog. You're sitting there, and you have this feeling of anxiety. But because there's so many different thoughts, different anxiety-provoking thoughts going on in your mind, you don't know what the root of the anxiety is. And you can't grab onto which thought it is that you think, what should I worry about first? Is it this? But what about that? It could be this. So you're all over the place, and you can't focus down to any one point, any one thought to start to process it, to get rid of it. Because as soon as you do focus just on one thing at a time, you can only process one thought. And by process, I mean look at it, analyze it. Not analyze it, I mean inquire into whether or not it's valid and begin to realize, okay, I can let this go. And it does involve feeling the feelings that come up with that, but it can be done is the point I'm saying. You can process, you can release one thought. You can let one thought go. You can't let 14 thoughts go at once. So that's the kind of mechanism that anxiety uses to keep you feeling anxious. You'll note it'll feel like a fog, a brain fog. I don't know what it is that's making me anxious. I can't pinpoint it. I have a few things going on, but I'm not sure what it is. And the only way to really identify, the hardest part of the whole process is finding out the core thought that's really, really bugging me. So in order to do that, what you need to do is get still for a while, get silent for a while, and allow yourself just to feel the anxiety for a moment. And you ask yourself, okay, I'm not going to figure out what it is that's really bothering me. I'm going to ask the feeling. I'm going to ask anxiety to come forward and tell me what it is that is really, really bugging me. And you allow yourself to be judgmental. You allow yourself to be insecure. You allow yourself to be irrational. And you identify, yes, this is the thing that is really, really the worst thing right now for me. And then you just follow that process I've talked about in other videos. But basically, you're just inquiring and trying to figure out, is this true or not true? Is this thought helpful to me? Would my life be better off without this? Is there any evidence that this is not true? Or is there any evidence that the opposite thought to this could actually be true? You will invariably find there is usually lots of evidence that the opposite is true. So I hope that helps, because that's really why the whole process is so difficult. It's this fog. So next time, if you are experiencing anxiety, and so many of us are experiencing anxiety out there, generalized anxiety or some kind of specific context related anxiety, start to realize this is why. And there's too many things going on. I need to narrow down my focus and see if that helps. And from my experience, it really, really can help. So give it a shot. And I hope it helps. Talk to you soon. Bye.