Treating generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), despite being hard, can be successful. To be successful, though, you need to adhere to a few simple guidelines. The first guideline you need to stick to is to surround yourself with recovery. This is probably a new concept for you, but don’t worry – in a moment I’ll explain what this concept involves, and you’ll see it’s not complicated at all.
To get to grips with this new idea of surrounding yourself with recovery, you need to understand all about the opposite of what this is. The opposite to this is surrounding yourself with negativity. This includes all those things you do that are negative and inspired or controlled by your anxiety: hanging around other people with anxiety problems, spending time on anxiety forums and message boards, or studying books that focus on suffering with anxiety.
Doing this stuff makes your mind get stuck in an anxiety trap that it’s hard to break free from. You begin feeling and experiencing the weight of other people’s anxiety problems, and this can be awful; it’s hard enough just dealing with your own problems. When this occurs, this is a typical case of surrounding yourself with total negativity. You don’t want to be in a position like this, because it can single-handedly halt all the progress you’d otherwise be making.
So if that’s “surrounding yourself with negativity,” what’s “surrounding yourself with recovery” and how is it different? It’s essentially avoiding everything that I outlined a moment ago: so stop talking to others who are suffering with anxiety right now, stop visiting online forums that focus solely on anxiety, and stop reading books that focus on your anxiety as it is right now.
Just stopping these things will solve your problem of “surrounding yourself with negativity.” But how do you “surround yourself with recovery?” Well, you just need to do the opposite of everything you’ve been doing until this point right now.
So rather than hanging around others who are suffering with anxiety and panic, hang around with people who suffered with anxiety in the past but found a way to beat it. Rather than hanging out at message boards full of people with anxiety, hunt out forums that are full of people who had anxiety disorders but found a way through them.
Rather than studying books that center on how to stop your anxiety, pick books that were written by people who actually lived with the problems themselves and found a way to overcome it. This fool proof approach will quickly lead you away from surrounding yourself with negativity and lead you towards surrounding yourself with recovery. Very quickly indeed you’ll be in much better mental shape.
Most of us tend to get what we spend most of our energy thinking about and focusing on. So when you start spending your time on recovery instead of the negative things, you can’t help but start moving quickly towards your goal of an anxiety free life.
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