What is “Anxiety” Really?

I got an email the other day from one of the Transformation Nation Members with a pretty good question.

It’s a good question because it nails the true issue that stops a lot of anxiety sufferers from actually finding relief.

And the key issue is whether anxiety is something we do or is something that happens to us.

I don’t know if you can handle me telling the truth here. Not everybody can.

Hopefully you are up to our transformation nation standard of being willing to take honest feedback and use it to “stalk” your own “stuff.”

Sometimes we need to get some tough love and honest coaching in order to cut through our own self deceit, clear it and move on to a more empowered, happier, more productive place where we can each bring MASSIVE value to the world through our own talents, and contributions instead of staying stuck in the old helpless, hopeless, victim place where most people live.

Here’s the question:

Hi mark! I miss the Transformation Tuesdays

I have a question for you that has been reoccurring for a while

It is known that ingesting certain chemicals can cause anxiety. Also the withdrawal of chemicals can cause severe anxiety. Stimulating certain parts of the brain electrically can cause anxiety as well as pressure on certain parts of the brain. Fatigue in general can cause anxiety, etc.

If this is the case, how is anxiety solely a product of imagining what you don’t want? And how is it not an illness? Who is to say that a person’s brain is not genetically prone to have pressure on the parts that causE anxiety or have more of certain chemicals in it which naturally cause more anxiety?

Thanks, very interested to hear your take on this! – E.

First of all, thank you for noticing I’ve stopped doing my “Transformation Tuesday Programs”.  I’m currently working with a high level business coach who gave ME some tough love and insisted I STOP doing anything that could possibly distract and delay me from passionately pursuing my Passionate Purpose EVEN if at some point in the past Transformation Tuesdays supported it.

Transformation Tuesdays were a fabulous training ground for me. I cleared a lot of my old “stuff” by committing to doing a program every week. The public commitment FORCED me to face some of my OWN self deceit and little bits of my own anxiety around performing my music. And I stepped up and took my own damn “medicine”.

However.

1. I needed a break.
2. I needed to find a way to reach a larger audience who is hungry for my message and music FIRST.
3. I installed a bunch of really cool, powerful BIG goals into my Time Line (like Traveling the Country teaching my Modern Jedi Mind Mastery Methods to bullied Teens) and some of them are shaping up BIG time which means I HAVE to focus my energies on what could actually SUPPORT me as well as thousands of young, open minds.
4. I WILL however keep up my daily discipline of writing a blog post or email newsletter almost every single day (or at least 6 out of 7 days. and since I started writing this yesterday and haven’t finished it until now this one counts for two days :o)

cool? cool.

Now to answer your question!

As you may know from my various courses and videos about How To CRUSH Anxiety, my definition of anxiety is this:

Anxiety is the thought process of focusing on what you DO NOT want to have happen in the future.

And BECAUSE your unconscious mind DOES NOT know the difference between what is real or imagined, your body will react to the imagined event AS IF IT IS REAL.

Big Pharma and Big Medicine want you to think Anxiety is a “Mental Disease” so they can sell you pills and get the health insurance companies to pay for them every month…and since they own the media, they have done a pretty good job of hypnotizing the masses to believe their definition of anxiety…

And its so much easier to believe that its outside of you… But there is no “anxiety germ” or “anxiety virus” or “anxiety gene” other than the one we all have which enables us to imagine a future we don’t want and then DO something to prevent it.  I INSIST that it is a step by step PROCESS that we all do in some form or another at some time or another…

So for example, I could imagine being strapped into the seat of a roller coaster and slowly, steadily being pulled up to the top of the track and then suddenly “falling” down the other side at a stomach clenching, GRAVITY obeying drop off that is  MASSIVELY SCARY (for me), not to mention the terrifying speed, g-force pulling curves etc….

If I do this vividly enough, my body will literally REACT as if it is REALLY HAPPENING.

But it’s not.

So, for another example, when someone has social anxiety, they are doing the same thing, imagining something embarrassing or uncomfortable enough around other people to trigger all the same fight, flight or freeze bio-chemistry that we recognize as “anxiety”.

Now where it gets interesting is that usually anxiety provoking situations are caused by a one time learning event at some point in our past. One example I use is Billy shoving a frog in Mary’s face in kindergarten and Mary “freaking out”. So now whenever Mary even hears the word “frog” or even sees a cute little cartoon frog on a greeting card or whatever, it brings up all the same memories and experiences in her neurology,( a.k.a. her imagination a.k.a. her unconscious mind).

The frog event is a “trauma”, a “one time learning event” that is so emotionally charged and intense that it STICKS. Because of it’s intensity and our hardwired desire to AVOID pain which is way stronger than MOVING TOWARDS PLEASURE, her unconscious mind is forever on the lookout for this situation… and anything that looks like the original situation will definitely get a lot of attention and focus and most likely TRIGGER the same reaction.

The anticipation of it happening again in the future is “anxiety”. Does that make sense?

Now I suppose all of this might “happen” somewhere specific in a person’s brain. I’m not a neuro scientist. I’m just a practitioner of NLP, Hypnosis and Time Line Therapy who has conquered anxiety in my own life as well as helping thousands and thousands of people to do the same in their lives.  So I don’t know where this actually happens in your brain or your left pinky or your gut.

The research I’ve encountered over the years as well as in my NLP training indicates that The body is a holograph. emotions don’t just happen in the brain. Emotions happen EVERYWHERE in the body as well as the body’s energy field.

The gut is also a key place where feel good and feel bad chemistry happens. Serotonin is created mostly in the gut. Wipe out all of your healthy bacteria in your digestive system and all of a sudden you might feel depressed or anxious.

A lot of research has been done lately with autistic kids who have totally recovered once their digestion was healed with pro-biotics and fermented vegetables. That’s another reason why I’m a total pro-biotic and fermented veggies guy. It totally has been proven to support cognitive functioning and balanced emotions.

so let’s say some one takes a drug that causes the body to experience what you “interpret” as anxiety.

Is it really anxiety? Meaning does the drug cause you to imagine worst case scenarios vividly enough to trigger fight or flight? Or is the drug triggering the same neuro connections, synapses etc that FEEL like anxiety.

Do you see the challenge here? Anxiety is A NAME, a label we have attached to a feeling, an emotion, a behavior, a habit, a response to a stimulus…

It’s a neurological pattern that you have practiced thousands upon thousands of times until you have no clue how you do it. But you ARE the one who is doing it.

So the answer to your question is, Who knows?

But the underlying presupposition,  your true concern is this: you want to somehow explain your inability to clear your anxiety even though you have tried so many techniques including mine, yet you STILL feel anxiety!

So you want someone to reassure you that it’s not your fault. Your internal dialogue or monologue may be going something like this:

“Maybe it’s a PHYSICAL thing and maybe I am not really in charge of my body, mind or anything else in my life. Maybe some day there WILL be a cure! In the meantime, I just have to stay here in  my parents house and not deal with all the shit from my childhood that is totally messing me and my entire life up.”

And again I ask you as I have asked so many times before with you and others:

• What do you gain from staying the same?
• What do you gain from being a victim of this thing you call “anxiety”?
• What to you get out of “nothing works for Me?”
• And when will you finally see that YOU are the one thinking your thoughts whether your thoughts arise because of some chemical in your body and make you think shitty thoughts… or your shitty thoughts trigger the chemicals in your body that make you feel bad.

What does it matter? You are still the one who is making yourself feel shitty. You don’t want to hear that “it’s a choice”. Because it doesn’t feel like a choice. It’s something you do unconsciously.

The ultimate belief here is that somehow you have no power to stop this.

And that’s why I often insist that a client attempt to make the problem WORSE first. Before we make it better.

Because if YOU can make it WORSE. Then WHO is making it in the first place?

Now. If you broke your leg. I would say some outside force acted upon the bone and snapped it.

But if you have anxiety, where is the “outside force”? Where is this coming from? Ghosts? Demons? Evil Spirits? some CHEMICAL? A DISEASE? Your GENES?

Did you inherit this from your parents who are also anxious? Did they inherit it from THEIR parents?

Is it in the genes? or Is it behavior that was modeled at a very young age by a very smart kid who knew instinctively that one way to stay alive was to act like mommy and daddy? Or was it a response to actual life threatening abusive conditions that as a kid you had no control over? When you were a child you might have been an actual victim of a horrible situation. But now that you are an adult you can change ANYTHING you truly want to change.

But here is the deal and I’m sorry to be the truth teller here:

NO ONE is going to fix this for you. My courses are the best in the world. But you still have to apply the tools. And if you think you have applied them but aren’t getting an improvement, then you aren’t actually applying them.

Seriously. When was the last time you wrote out “Why does this work out better than I can possibly imagine?” a hundred times? A thousand times? While you were doing the 7 other Anxiety CRUSHERS? When did you spend a day totally and completely obsessively and compulsively running the tools and techniques through your neurology? did you keep a log and check your progress every single day as you compulsively and obsessively practiced the anxiety crushing tools?

The tough love truth is that YOU have to commit beyond what you have committed so far up to this point. You have to commit beyond what you think is commitment. You have to burn the boats and know that this is the moment to fully and completely go FULL OUT TOWARDS what you want.

In other words take repeated, sustained ACTION.

There will never be a drug that stops this. Drugs only mask the real emotions and keep you from doing the deep work you know you need to do but don’t want to do yet.

If you are in a bad home situation. Move out.

If you are a massive introvert and need solitary time. Give it to yourself. But learn how to increase your social intelligence and enjoyment of people when you go out and about in your life.

You want more friends? Start by being a great friend and learn the dynamics of social intelligence. And practice, practice practice with no expectations. Join a bunch of meetup groups and actually go to them.

If you want to lose weight stop eating crap, eat only whole, real foods, fast 1 -2 times per week from dinner to dinner (no big deal). get your ass to a gym and start doing slow burn resistance training and High Intensity Interval training. Get rid of your desk chair and stand while you work at you computer, do stuff you like that requires moving your body. take the stairs instead of the elevator. Stop watching TV.  YOU  are living in that body. TAKE CARE OF IT. No One Can Do It For You.

So anxiety is not some special category from any other human “problem”.

Your problem isn’t really anxiety. Your “problem” is that you’ve been allowing other people or your “disease” of anxiety to write your story for you. Your story is stuck in the opening scene and hasn’t progressed to the hero leaving home and striking out on his or her own on the big adventure of your life. Your story hasn’t progressed beyond the call to adventure. You are being called out into the world as a man as a woman as the hero of your own story.

If Frodo Baggins had stayed in the Shire… If Harry Potter had stayed under the stairs and never gone to Hogwarts… If Odysseus had never left home in Ithaca… his 4,000 year old rep as a serious badass wouldn’t exist… do you see this? This is a Universal call. And you’ve been avoiding it because change is scary. Even POSITIVE change.

And you are terrified. Of what? Dying?

That’s the ultimate game ender. But until you tear it up and wear out your welcome here on this amazing planet in the middle of a small solar system in a small galaxy in an infinite universe… it’s time to start living instead of staying stuck in your little cubicle or little life or little relationships or preconceived, generalized notions of “reality”.

I hold all of you in such deep respect. Please understand. I know you’ve been in excruciating pain. I don’t want to be that guy that just shouts at the team to do 10 more pushups…

You don’t want to hear me say, “Grab life by the metaphorical balls and get the fvck out into your life.”  You want me to somehow let you off the hook for the fact that you are creating this experience. You want compassion from me.

But right now? Right now it’s time for tough love.

There is also kind of dis-belief that we create these experiences that seem so painful for us. I often hear, “why would I do this to myself?”

You know?

If I’m really in charge of my emotions and experience of anxiety or being overweight because I eat when I’m anxious then I’m doing it to myself. This is not “blaming the victim.”

There are no victims here.

Playing the victim is still a self delusion. I’ve had clients ask, “Why would I cause myself so much pain? This HAS to be from somewhere outside of me. The HAS to be a medical thing… I CAN’T be doing this to myself! Why would I be so cruel to myself?”

And those are exactly the questions that only YOU can answer…

• Why would you do such a horrible stultifying thing to yourself as install and practice INTENSE anxiety so severe you can’t leave the house? What? Is your unconscious mind Crazy?

Nope. It’s not crazy. It’s doing it for a reason but you are not “getting” the message yet. And maybe you never will…

Until the day that you CAN NOT STAND IT ANY MORE AND YOU TAKE CHARGE OF YOUR CHANGE AND START FOCUSING RELENTLESSLY ON A FUTURE THAT IS WORTH LIVING AND WORTH BREAKING OUT OF YOUR CAGE FOR…

Until that day you will just be another victim thinker sitting in their own mess.

But on that day… The day that is coming…

When you realize like Tyler Durden in the movie Fight Club, that

“this is your life and it’s ending one minute at a time”

You will begin your hero’s journey.

You’re probably not ready yet. But that’s ok.

You’re getting there. You’re close.

When you are totally ready the movement will appear.

The shift. The transformation… is coming.

And who am I to say, “You’re ready. You’ll only be ready when you are ready to be ready…”

if you get my Ericksonian Hypnotic “drift” deep in to a transformational experience the next time you forget to do the problem… and release all expectations or goals other than this present precise precious moment that is here and gone, here and gone, here and gone, the beating of your heart… Who do you want to be? The writer, director, star and biggest fan of the movie of your life? Or just someone doing what he is told by an old script that was written by someone else or by your 3 year old self who didn’t quite get how the world works..

In the old days young men and women went through initiation trials that were often intense and even life threatening. We have lost that in our culture so you might want to consider that THIS is your initiation.

Find your edges and lean in to them even if  you fall down…

Brush your self off and get up again. You have work to do…

Love yourself until your love is true. True for you….

It may be really, really, hard but you can do it.

The only way out is through.

Peace.

The really important thing is just to be fully aware that you can realize the change you’re looking for…

And here’s how

Click the link below to:

• Check out Crush Anxiety Now
• Review my hypnosis video programs
• Contact me today

– Mark

p.s. listen to this song. Over and Over and Over again. There will be a test.