Escaping the Experience of Anxiety

Why You're Experiencing Anxiety and How to Escape It

Neil R. Oliver

• Publisher: Neil R. Oliver
• eBook ISBN: 9780648111351
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Anxiety is one of the most psychologically torturous, emotionally traumatising internal experiences a person will ever endure. Presenting itself as a random happening deceiving the person experiencing it into believing they are out of control, unable to escape. With the absence of intellectual understanding it can seem impossible to break free from the psychological torment and emotional trauma manifested through the experience of anxiety. Anxiety is an experience of our own making, it is not a random happening. Escaping the Experience of Anxiety will provide those suffering anxiety the intellectual understanding necessary, and conscious awareness needed to regain a state of psychological control and emotional stability.

Escaping the Experience of Anxiety will help you discipline your mind putting you back in control. You will be guided through the process of eliminating unwanted psychological patterns which are responsible for the emotional trauma associated with fear, worry, doubt and uncertainty. Ultimately you will be given what you need so you are positioned, enabled and empowered to live in the present moment taking responsibility for what has always been fully within your own control.

Chapter 1

What is Anxiety?

The experience of anxiety is one of the most psychologically tormenting and emotionally traumatising experiences a person will ever have to endure in their internal life. Its presence can be both known to the person experiencing it or unknown, remaining covertly hidden from a person’s conscious awareness. Many people experience the psychological, emotional and physical consequences of anxiety, suffering through and enduring the torment and trauma it provokes before ever becoming consciously aware of what is causing their experience. So, what is anxiety? How do we define it so we can make sense of it? First, we must accept anxiety to be an experience. It’s not a random happening; it’s an experience of our own manifestation. We create anxiety; it doesn’t just happen to us. I accept that to those intensely suffering through the experience of anxiety right now, there might be some reluctance to digest the truth.

Anxiety is manufactured via psychological processes which then manifest emotional experiences that influence belief systems at the deepest subconscious level. We will address the cause of anxiety in upcoming chapters. However, for now, you must understand that your experience of anxiety is the direct result of what you’re thinking, how you’re thinking, and how that thinking is then influencing your emotional experience. Coming full circle from this influences your belief system which then influences your conscious thought patterns once again. This is why it can seem impossible to escape the cycle of anxiety when you’re experiencing it. When you’re in it, your thoughts are creating your emotions, your emotions are then provoking more thought; on and on this continues until a person reaches their emotional threshold and is unable to cope.

”First, we must accept anxiety to be an experience. It’s not a random happening; it’s an experience of our own manifestation. We create anxiety; it doesn’t just happen to us.

While enduring the experience of anxiety, a person will typically overthink everything at a very rapid rate. This makes everything in their psychological experience extremely complex and almost impossible to make sense of from their own strength alone. It is this psychological complexity which covertly tricks people into believing that escaping anxiety is not possible. To break free, you will be required to simplify what you think you know. You will need to accept simplicity free from the temptation of overthinking the simplicity of what you are learning. For some, they will only ever believe something has value if it comes with a high degree of complexity. The reason some people reject simplicity at first is due to simplicity challenging a person’s psychological need for significance. To accept simplicity places a person at risk of feeling inadequate, because if they start to believe it really is so simple, they feel they should have always known it. For some, it is too difficult and confrontational to overcome the thought of being inadequate. So, at first, they protect themselves by rejecting simplicity.

There are times when to move forward we must simplify things in order to make them easier to process, easier to understand, and easier to apply. To break free from the experience of anxiety, we must simplify our understanding of what is happening in our internal experience, while also simplifying the process of regaining psychological control and emotional freedom. Experiencing anxiety does not necessarily mean you are mentally ill, damaged goods, weird, broken beyond repair or anything else you may have labelled yourself or been labelled by others. In identifying anxiety as an experience, we provide ourselves the opportunity to disassociate anxiety as being part of who we are. In other words, anxiety as an experience is nothing more than your experience, it has nothing to do with who you are or what you’re capable of as a person, because it’s just an experience you’re having. If you accept anxiety to be an experience, you’re protecting yourself from identifying that you are the experience. This is critical for you to understand. You are not anxiety. You experience anxiety. Anxiety is a manifestation of psychological and emotional processes influencing your belief system. Anxiety is not who you are. So do not own any part of it as you; do not identify yourself as anxiety in any way.

Consider anxiety to be a form of internal feedback. Its presence is an indication to you that you have temporarily lost both psychological control and emotional control of your internal experience. When you lose control of your psychological experience, you will then be out of control of your emotional experience. Neurologically, it has been proven that thoughts create emotions. Thoughts, in and of themselves, are the catalyst events which manifest emotions experienced in the physical body. Negative, self-destructive, fear-based thoughts will produce the equivalent in undesired emotions. If a person maintains an out-of-control psychological state of being for long enough, continuing to entertain lies, believing negative thoughts to be true, buying into the fear believing it to be reality, this will provoke a person into a critically high level of negative emotional intensity. They will find it hard to escape their experience of anxiety because the intensity of their experience is the very requirement for the mind to believe the internal experience to be a real experience. In turn, this influences the brain to store the content of the experience as belief. Once belief is stored as memory, these beliefs then have the power to influence a person’s default conscious thought patterns and behaviour.

Don’t give in to the temptation of lies that would have you believe that you can’t escape anxiety, that no one truly understands the torment and torture of your internal experience, and that there’s no one out there who can help you. It’s just not true. And let go of worrying about what other people may think of you if they were to find out you have been suffering through the experience of anxiety. There is always the temptation to hide the truth of our experience and to withdraw or isolate ourselves from people. These are universal ways people with anxiety deal with what they are experiencing, but rarely do they help. We must also be careful to protect ourselves from the influence of those who put us down because of our experience. Unless a person has truly experienced anxiety at the most severe extreme levels themselves, it is unlikely they will have the understanding needed to display the level of empathy and compassion to truly comprehend your experience. In their own ignorance, some are quick to judge things they do not understand.

I have a question for you: Who is in control of, and responsible for, what happens inside of your own internal psychological and emotional experience? In other words, who thinks your thoughts, and who then creates your emotions? The answer is you, and only you. Next question: Who else is responsible for what happens in your own internal psychological and emotional experience? The answer is no one else, only you. Yes, while people can do and say things to you, and life can throw all sorts of unwanted, undesired challenges at you, neither people nor your external challenges have the power to make you think what you’re thinking or feel what you’re feeling. What you think and what you feel have always been and are entirely your own responsibility. You are fully capable to take responsibility for what is within your control. You are the one who is responsible for all your psychological and emotional reactions to both your internal and external experiences in life.

Without any intellectual understanding of how you work psychologically, and how that impacts you emotionally, you lack the conscious awareness needed to gain and maintain control despite what is happening to you in your experience of life. For this reason, no one has the right to judge you because you are experiencing anxiety. If you don’t know how something works, how then can you fix it? Right now, you must accept that you and only you are responsible for what happens in your own internal psychological and emotional experience. Will you now choose to take responsibility for what happens inside of your own internal experience? Choosing to take responsibility for what you can control is the first step in breaking free from the experience of anxiety. The truth is, you are your own remedy. The experience of anxiety is a manifestation of your own creation. Once your intellectual understanding is equipped adequately, will you choose to remain consciously aware of what is happening within you, and will you then choose to control what is well within your ability to control?

“You are the one who is responsible for all your psychological and emotional reactions to both your internal and external experiences in life.

Each of us has a decision to make moment by moment. That decision is: Will we consciously choose to live in this present moment and take control of what is happening within our internal experience in this present moment? This is a choice freely available to every single person. Some are aware they have a choice; most are not. If, up until this point in time, you were not aware that you ultimately have full power and control of what happens within your own internal experience—that’s okay. But now that you know it’s possible, that you can have total power and control over your internal experience, once equipped, will you do what needs to be done to ensure you escape the psychological torment and emotional trauma of anxiety? Turning your back on your personal responsibility to control what is happening within your own internal experience will keep you experiencing the anxiety over time.

No drug on the planet will fully cure you of the experience of anxiety, because the experience itself is a by-product of psychological processes influencing emotional processes that impact belief systems at the deepest level. A person’s belief system is the very thing which influences their behaviour. While humans possess the capacity to think with their intellectual mind, there will always be some who don’t yet intellectually understand their psychological processes and how these processes impact them emotionally. This lack of understanding will keep them unconsciously unaware, unable to escape the experience of anxiety with any sort of control.

Medications typically prescribed today supress—they don’t cure. To be clear, I am not anti-medication. I do believe there are medications out there which do impact people in positive ways to help a person find balance within their internal experience of life. There’s no one quick fix or cure for anxiety. But the medications widely used today help supress the experience of anxiety. They are not a cure in and of themselves. Both medication and psychological therapies of many varieties can assist a person in lessening their experience of anxiety. Sometimes medications are the correct first step for a person trying to survive anxiety. There are times when people who are in crisis need immediate help. In these times, medication may be the best available option.

The one thing medication cannot do, however, is increase a person’s intellectual understanding of their internal experience, nor can it teach a person how to take responsibility in the present moment for what is well within their own ability to control. When a person improves their intellect by increasing their conscious awareness, that person then regains a sense of control. If they then choose to apply what they know in the present moment, they provide themselves an opportunity to escape the severe consequences which accompany a person who chooses not to take control.

“Right now, you must accept that you and only you are responsible for what happens in your own internal psychological and emotional experience.

It’s possible even your doctor or therapist may not possess the intellectual understanding to be consciously aware of what you are experiencing, if they are simply educated on the subject rather than truly experiencing it themselves. We must not blame anyone for not understanding our internal experience. The inner workings of psychological processes themselves can elude even the brightest intellects. While it may be true that not everyone we look to for help truly understands what we are experiencing we have a responsibility to search and search until we find the answers to our unanswered questions.

This book has been strategically designed to purposefully increase your intellectual understanding of anxiety, while also providing you the conscious awareness needed to observe what is happening within your own internal experience. On the completion of studying the content within these pages, you will be equipped with the intellectual understanding needed to take responsibility for controlling what is happening within your internal experience. Ultimately my intention is to equip your intellect to the point that you can stand on your own two feet without needing my intervention to escape the experience of anxiety. The goal is to provide you a pathway to achieve an internal experience of life free from the consequences of psychological torment and emotional trauma—to give you back power and control over your internal experience.

Chapter 2

Understanding How Anxiety Manifests

When we are unequipped with intellectual understanding, we lack the conscious awareness of our internal psychological processes. This lack of understanding keeps us in a state of blindness; we are simply unaware of how our psychological processes are influencing both our internal and external experiences. To the person lacking conscious awareness, it can make life seem almost impossible to navigate through. Without conscious awareness, we navigate through life like a ship in a storm without a rudder. As we live our experiences, we are unable to gain a state of control or tpgive our life proper direction, because the device we need to navigate correctly and put ourselves back in control is absent.

Lacking conscious awareness, we live in a reactionary state of being. As we interact with people, as life challenges us with unexpected events or unwanted situations, we react to the external stimulus first via our psychological experience. How the person or event has provoked our thinking patterns, and how that has then provoked our emotional experience, is our first reaction. For the person enduring the experience of anxiety, this will be an all too familiar reaction. Typically for the person experiencing anxiety, the external stimulus of a person, unexpected event, or unwanted situation, is nothing in ...

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• 1. What is Anxiety?
• 2. Understanding How Anxiety Manifests
• 3. Why You Haven’t Escaped Anxiety Sooner?
• 4. Making Sense of Thoughts and Emotions
• 5. Emotional Experience Addiction
• 6. Unpacking Psychological Needs
• 7. Understanding Happiness
• 8. Understanding Truth
• 9. Breaking Free from Anxiety
• 10. Truth Based Statement Exercise
• 11. Avoiding Anxiety in the Future