When you need to address generalized anxiety disorder, it can often be hard to find a good option. But if you stick to some very basic rules, you can have wonderful success. The most important of these rules is to surround yourself with recovery instead of negativity. This might sound like a strange idea, but once I’ve explained the reasoning behind it, you’ll see why it makes sense.
To get to grips with this new concept 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.
These things cause your mind to stay locked onto your anxiety disorder. Worse still, you’ll begin to feel the weight of other people’s anxiety problems as well, simply by spending time reading about or listening to their own stories of anxiety. This is “surrounding yourself with negativity,” and it can be extremely damaging. In some cases, it can completely stop your progress towards overcoming your anxiety related problems.
Now that you get this idea of surrounding yourself in negativity, you probably already see the obvious way out of this situation: you avoid all the things that lead you down this path. That would include not spending too much of your time with people who also have severe anxiety, not spending too much of your time in anxiety-based chat rooms or message boards, and not spending too much of your time on anxiety-related books.
If you do nothing but stop these fundamental things, the problem of surrounding yourself with negativity will quickly become history. But once you’ve done that, how do you go about surrounding yourself with recovery? Easy: you just do the opposite of what you’ve been doing up until now.
Here’s how to do that: don’t hang out with people with anxiety, hang out with people who had anxiety in the past but got over it. Don’t hang out on message boards with people who have anxiety, hang out on message boards with people who had anxiety in the past and got over it. Don’t read books about people who have anxiety, read books about people who had anxiety in the past but got over it.
Instead of reading books that concentrate on how to beat your anxiety, read books written by people who’ve already had anxiety and overcome it. These simple things will get you away from “surrounding yourself with negativity” and take you into the land of “surrounding yourself with recovery.” You’ll be in immediately better shape, and immediately put yourself on a much more healthy path that leads towards beating anxiety for good.
Most of us tend to get what we spend most of our energy thinking about and focusing on. So when you begin 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.