Are you tired of feeling held back by fear and anxiety? Do you find yourself avoiding certain situations or activities because you're afraid of what might happen? Do you have trouble sleeping or concentrating because your mind is constantly racing with anxious thoughts?
If so, you're not alone. Fear and anxiety are two of the most common mental health challenges people face. But what if I told you that there was a way to instantly stop fear and anxiety? That's right, you can literally stop feeling afraid and anxious in the moment.
In this video, I'm going to share with you a powerful technique that has helped thousands of people overcome fear and anxiety. This technique is simple, yet incredibly effective. And it can be used by anyone, anywhere, anytime. So if you're ready to break free from the chains of fear and anxiety, then let's get started!
In this video, you will learn:
What fear and anxiety really are
How they affect your body and mind
The one simple technique that can instantly stop fear and anxiety
How to use this technique in any situation How to overcome fear and anxiety for good
If you're ready to take control of your life and live without fear or anxiety, then this video is for you. Click play now and start your journey to inner peace!
Learn how to calm your body and mind in the midst of a panic attack or other anxiety-inducing situation. Discover how to change your negative thinking patterns so that you can stop catastrophizing and start living in the present moment. Gain the confidence to face your fears and take risks, knowing that you have a powerful tool to help you stay calm and focused.
So what are you waiting for? Click play now and start your journey to inner peace!
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Transcript
Fear and Anxiety: Common Mental Health Challenges
Are you tired of feeling held back by fear and anxiety? Do you find yourself avoiding certain situations or activities because you're afraid of what might happen? Do you have trouble sleeping or concentrating because your mind's constantly racing with anxious thoughts?
If so, you're not alone. Fear and anxiety are two of the most common mental health challenges people face. But what if I told you that there was a way to instantly stop fear and anxiety? That's right. You can literally stop feeling afraid and anxious in this moment. In this video, I'm going to share with you a powerful technique that's helped thousands of people overcome fear and anxiety.
This technique is simple, yet incredibly effective, and it could be used by anyone, anywhere, anytime. So if you're ready to break free from the chains of fear and anxiety, let's get started.
Hey there, I'm Meadow DeVor, helping you with the basics of personal development so that you can build self-worth I share practical ways to change your life.
Two Types of Anxiety: Body Based Anxiety
Anxiety typically starts in two different ways. What I call body-based anxiety is where physical sensations in the body lead to a voice in your head starting to speak.
For instance, you might have a cup of coffee and then your body feels the effects of the caffeine and your heart starts beating faster, and then that voice in your head starts telling stories that create fear to match the experience of your body.
Two Types of Anxiety: Thought Based Anxiety
Or you could have thought based anxiety, that voice in your head, leading to physical sensations in the body. So for instance, you could start worrying about a presentation that you have to deliver, and then your heart starts racing and your palm starts sweating and then your mind starts saying things that scare you, and then your body responds.
So either way, the voice in your head plays a key role.
The Voice in Your Head
The voice in your head is a narrator, a repeater, a reminder of your anxieties and worries.
That voice inside your head is often critical, envious. Full of rage or ready to bolt. It can mimic voices from your past. It might do a brilliant impression of your mother or your second grade teacher, or even your ex-husband. It can grab pieces of past conversations, usually the things that you wish you could forget and embed them in your head, like a Katy Perry song, just running over and over.
And even though this voice might sound like your own voice, the important thing to know is that this voice isn't you. This voice is merely an aspect of your mind that functions like a software system, running strategies to control and predict possible threats. The voice isn't personal. It's not against you.
It's not really for you either. It's not trying to hurt your feelings. It's not trying to sabotage you. It's merely an aspect of your mind that's trying to make the world around it behave so that life becomes predictable so that you can feel safe.
The Role of the Amygdala: Anxiety and Fear
This voice comes from a tiny little part of your brain called the amygdala.If you imagine drawing a line between both of your ears and visualize two little almonds positioned behind each eye, it's a good idea of the shape, size, and location of this little beast of a voice.
The almonds, the amygdala, are part of your limbic system. The limbic system is also known as the reptilian brain or the emotional brain, and it takes in information through your senses and attaches an emotion to it. The amygdala serves as triage master for all incoming information.
Information comes through the senses, and those little almonds go to work. Sorting and ranking potential threats, determining whether you're safe or at risk. When things are familiar and predictable.
Your little almonds are nice and quiet, but life is never all that predictable Reality is a constant barrage of things that change, things that are unfamiliar and things that put us at risk, whether these are physical or emotional threats.
These perceived threats trigger the amygdala's fear, rage response, raising your brain's level of anxiety so that you can pay attention and eliminate the threat. So when you understand the nature of this voice and the intention of it, you'll see that it evolved for a really important reason.
The voice is very helpful when you encounter something dangerous like a car getting to a stop in front of you on the highway, or a grease fire in your kitchen, or a black widow under your bathroom sink.
The problem is that your voice in your head yells loudly no matter what the threat is. Whether the house is on fire or your jeans aren't fitting right, that voice in your head think both are dangerous and both are triaged as threats to this aspect of your mind. Everything is an emergency and everything, and everyone needs to be controlled.
The Evolution of Anxiety and Fear
This primitive part of your brain was handed down from your ancestors and evolved to keep you fed, watered, warm, and away from predators. It also kept you safe from acts of nature, attacks from neighboring tribes.
It kept you safe within your own tribe, so you weren't exiled because that would have meant certain death. So imagine all that history and all that beautiful programming that once kept humans safe from famine, floods, blizzards, and bear attacks. Now being funneled into whether or not an Instagram post got likes, or whether your coworker is talking behind your back, or whether someone swiped right.
Impending danger triggers a very old part of our brain. And when that part gets freaked out, the voice in your head can be a bit like an annoying car alarm going off at two in the morning.
It's difficult to have a clear thought, and it's nearly impossible to not react to that sound when it goes off, right? So the good news is that just like a car alarm, this voice evolved to keep you alert and safe, and it does a great job when the threat is real.
The bad news is just like a car alarm most of the time. There's no real threat. And until you shut it down, it just keeps blaring for no good reason.
Distance Yourself from the Voice in Your Head
So the work here is to train yourself to not react to the voice in your head, and to see it more like that annoying car alarm in the middle of the night it's to treat that voice more like background noise and less like the ultimate authority on safety. So once that car alarm is going, your mind automatically finds supporting evidence to reinforce its beliefs. It's like an algorithm that's on the hunt for fake news. When you believe a story, like something bad is going to happen, your mind gets busy offering you supporting evidence.
It filters through information to offer you more and more proof to support the belief. If your mind is anything like mine, it goes full on conspiracy theory mode in two seconds flat. Seeking data to support physical sensations that I start to feel like someone's mad at me or somebody's gonna get me, or life is chaos, or things are just gonna keep getting worse until I'm in a total tailspin. Your mind might replay that time that you didn't listen to your intuition, you ended up getting stuck in traffic, or it'll pull up current evidence from your greatest hits list about all your worries, worries about money, or your relationship, or lack thereof, or it'll start obsessing about things that are totally beyond your control, like why your apartment building is so loud at night or why you said a particular thing in a conversation that already happened, or maybe your neighbor didn't wave to you when you walked by, or you forgot to pick up milk or your friend didn't respond to a text and then your mind says, see, I told you life was dangerous.
How to Calm the Body
While the mind is the primary player in anxiety, the body still plays a role.
So before you start to quiet the voice in your head, it's best to help your body feel safe. My absolute go-to is my weighted blanket it's on the pricey side though, because it's fancy and organic and super cute. So I also shared a link to my good old tried and true weighted blanket that I've had for almost a decade. Both are linked below. So you can use a weighted blanket as a quick and reliable hack to help you create the sensation of safety in your body while you use this tool to quiet your mind.
How to Calm the Mind
To find peace, you must disengage from this voice in your head. The practice is to set a boundary with this voice. This means that as soon as you become conscious of any anxious story, you interrupt the pattern, redirect and refocus. Over time, you'll stop taking that voice so seriously and you'll begin to see it more like that faulty car alarm. Instead of allowing it to consume your attention, you'll get better at minimizing your emotional reaction, redirecting your attention, and consciously focusing on a better story.
Wait, if the goal is to stop taking it all so seriously, how do you actually do that? How do you actually stop reacting to the message that makes you feel so terrible? One of my favorite quotes on writing is from Hemingway's memoir, A Movable Feast.
He says, all you have to do is write one true sentence, write the truest sentence that you know.
This advice is profound, not only for writing, but also for anyone who is experiencing overwhelm, anxiety, and worry. If you typed up. All the things that the voice in your head says in a 24 hour period, you'd have a lot of random nonsense, a lot of fear, a lot of judgment, and sorting through all those thousands of thoughts and grievances and worries.
Do you think there's even one thought that you'd keep as undeniably true?
My guess is no.
Truth Calms the Mind
Truth is a sweet spot for the mind. It's an axis, it's a point of stabilization. It gives your mind focus, and it creates a sense of calm and harmony and safety.
Anxiety and truth cannot coexist. So truth gives the mind something to hold onto, something to trust. One true sentence has the power to calm the mind. So focusing on one true thing, you can actually find stillness.
To quickly reduce the power of the voice in your head, and to redirect your attention to inner peace, ask yourself to state one true thing, the truest thing. You know. I'm just gonna tell you right now, you're going to say things that won't necessarily be true in that moment when you're really anxious and you're really freaking out,
What I want you to think about right in that moment is if someone had the very best attorney and took you to court to disprove that thought, would it hold up in court? So the truth will hold up in court. It will hold up against the best attorney out there.
Examples of How to Calm Anxiety
So try to find something actually true, something real something right now. So here are a few examples of the truest thing, you know? So imagine you're anxious and you're trying to sleep and your thoughts are racing. So the truth is, I'm just afraid. The truth is I'm just tired. The truth is I'm laying in my bed or my pillow is soft, or my covers are cold or hot so don't say something like, everything's going to be okay. Your brain will go freaking bananas on that one because it's not true. You can't possibly know that's true, and your brain immediately calls BS. So don't say something like, we'll get through this, or I'll be okay, because again, anything but the truth is going to be like throwing gasoline on the fire.
Bring it back to super simple truths. This is the way you reset your mind. The one true thing doesn't necessarily have to be this super perky life-coachy thought to interrupt the pattern.
All you have to do is say something true. For example, one true thing might be, I'm in the habit of paying attention to my anxiety. This isn't a great story, but if it's true to you, it's surprisingly relieving to admit this to yourself. One true thing gets you out of that worry obsessed voice and redirects more towards an intimate relationship with who you really are.
The truth offers solid ground to stand on. One truth thing, even when the truth isn't pretty, helps to alleviate the sense of anxiety, overwhelm and worry. By giving your mind a point of focus, you remember that you're not the voice in your head, you're the one listening to it.
How to Stop Fear and Anxiety Instantly: 5 Steps
So grab your weighted blanket and settle your body down, and I'll take you through this tool step by step.
One, think of a situation where you often feel worried, anxious, or overwhelmed.
Two, imagine the story that plays out in your head during this situation. What story does your mind come up with?
Three. Now set a boundary with that story. So instead of believing that story or allowing it to influence your behavior or your emotions, take a moment to intentionally put that message in that faulty car alarm category, even though the message might be difficult to ignore. See if you can remove your internal reaction from that mental noise.
Four, redirect by asking yourself what's one true thing, what's the truest thing I know? Then tap into that deeper, wiser part of your consciousness by bringing your attention to the truth.
Now, five, if you're stuck, this is my go-to phrase, and it always works. You can say, I am a woman, man, kid, person, whoever you are, sitting, standing, or laying down.
That always works because it's always going to be true. So just pick who you are and what you're doing right now, and that's always going to be true. So when you settle into that, things calm down.
A lot of times anxiety arises when you're in a dysfunctional situation where you're being manipulated maybe at work or in your personal life. So to learn how to handle manipulation, watch this video next: How to Handle Manipulative People.
CHAPTERS
0:00 Common Mental Health Issues: Anxiety and Fear
0:56 Two Types of Anxiety
1:18 Thought Based Anxiety
1:34 Anxiety and the Voice in Your Head
2:29 The Role of the Amygdala: Anxiety and Fear
3:42 The Evolution of Anxiety and Fear
5:25 Distance Yourself from the Voice in Your Head
6:45 How to Calm the Body
7:14 How to Calm the Mind
8:31 Truth Calms the Mind
8:57 Find One True Thing
9:30 Examples of How to Calm Anxiety
10:56 How to Stop Fear and Anxiety Instantly: 5 Steps
