[Question] What Causes Your Anxiety?

Have you ever suffered from anxiety…

Psychologists tell us that anxiety is a general term for nervousness, fear, worry and apprehension.

More common ‘Anxiety disorders’ can include:

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)
• Panic Disorder
• Phobias
• Social Anxiety Disorder
• Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD)
• Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
• Separation Anxiety Disorder

There are also different levels of anxiety ranging from a vague uneasy feeling to debilitating panic attacks.

Most people have experienced, to some degree, one or more of these disorders at least once in their lives. Some of you are still battling with anxiety!

Any kind of anxiety can powerfully affect how you feel, interpret and react to circumstances, and they drive your choices and behaviors. It’s normal to feel anxious before exams, interviews, dates or performances. However, anxiety becomes a problem when its symptoms interfere with your ability to focus, sleep, or function normally. The symptoms can and usually do build ever so slightly over days, weeks, months, years.

When your perceptions and thoughts about a situation are out of proportion to what’s really going on, anxiety becomes a real problem. You may suddenly look inwardly one day and wonder where ‘YOU’ have disappeared to!

What causes anxiety though?

Well, you’ll be aware that anxiety can be caused by a number of external factors such as abuse, or stress about health and/or (usually both) finances, work or relationships. It can also be caused by medical conditions such as illness-related imbalances in brain chemistry, side effects of medication, drugs or alcohol, or even genetics.

Most commonly, anxiety is caused by stress. But here’s the interesting thing about stress: you are in control of how you perceive, interpret and react to every situation – which means, you are in control of your stress.

One of the biggest problem’s with … well, problems … is that sometimes, you actually can’t do anything about them. It’s one thing to have the courage to face a problem head-on and solve it but if you don’t have the resources, knowledge, skills, or other ways to solve the problem, it only adds to your anxiety.

In this instance, there’s a way to remain calm and relaxed, even when everything is going wrong and you can’t fix it.

How can you manage your stress, so that you aren’t consumed by anxious thoughts and feelings?

You can get psychological counseling to help you manage your stressful thoughts. You can support a more positive mood using pharmaceutical or natural (herbal) remedies.

OR there’s another way to significantly reduce anxiety for free, at home, by meditating.

You can decide right now that you will not be controlled for one more minute by anxiety and meditation as your new tool will astonish you very quickly.

You will find it to be the most natural, enjoyable, physically and mentally rewarding practice that effectively treats the symptoms – and the causes – of anxiety.

As an awesome bonus, you’ll also go on an adventure. One so exciting because the ‘you’ that somehow got lost for a while finds the way home.

Here are 4 key areas that are going to change in your life almost immediately with just a few minutes of daily meditation. Anxiety and meditation go to work hand in hand so you can live the life you’re supposed to have always been living.

1. Meditation helps you become aware of your self-talk.

So that you know whether your automatic thoughts are supportive, or unsupportive. Are you always telling yourself what can go wrong? Are you always focused on the problem? Do you call yourself stupid? Do you tell yourself you’re a failure?

Be Mindful here …… your self-talk drives your feelings about yourself and directly influences your behaviors.

Without this awareness, you can’t upgrade your self-talk. When you do upgrade your self talk, you become more solution-oriented, empowered and clear-thinking. You’re able to direct your thoughts to something productive rather than letting your fear paralyze you into inaction.

You can easily achieve this awareness in meditation. Simply listen to your mental chatter, without any judgment and without trying to influence your thoughts in any way. Just get to know your automatic thoughts – and how they make you feel.

Once you become aware of the destructive ways your self-talk causes you to feel stressed and anxious, you can begin to change those automatic self-defeating thoughts, and be free from anxiety.

2. Meditation relaxes your body.

The long-term effects of chronic stress and anxiety can and do cause serious health issues. Imagine your body always being on “red alert” because you’re in crisis mode about something going on in your life. High and constant levels of cortisol, adrenaline and nonadrenaline (the stress hormones) can lead to high blood pressure, heart problems, and even adrenal fatigue.

While sleep is the ideal time for your body to recalibrate and heal, anxiety makes it hard to sleep well, and you might not be getting enough deep sleep. Meditation offers you a chance to take as many mini-breaks as you choose throughout the day (as little as 5 minutes) to calm your mind so you’re less reactive. You’ll love how meditation calms your physical body too, allowing it to perform its “rest and digest” functions so much more productively.

3. Meditation helps you stay in the present moment.

Think about it: when you’re worried about something, you are not worried about “what is” but about “what might happen” (in the future) or “what happened” (in the past). So shifting your thoughts away from the past or the future alone will help you relax.

As you develop the ability to shift your thoughts to one topic or another at will, and keep your attention there, you will feel something extraordinary: personal power.

Outside events will no longer have such power over you!

4. Finally, meditation boosts your mental functioning of which includes:

Creativity … which can lead to surprisingly unexpected ways of solving whatever problem is keeping you up at night.

Clarity … so you can see the problem for what it really is, not what your emotions make it out to be (it brings it back into perspective).

Concentration and focus… so you can put all of your mental resources into solving a problem.

So if you suffer on a daily basis from Anxiety and Meditation is your chosen way of saying Goodbye to it once and for all. NOTE:

We care and will support you every single step of the way.

When you ask …. How long must I meditate for?

We say …. On a daily basis, 5 minutes is enough! Once, twice or thrice a day. It really depends on you. We’ll talk about increasing meditation times later if you choose to find more time in the day for your practice. This is actually not uncommon. The more you see and FEEL the benefits, the more you’ll want to meditate.

Meditation really isn’t just for monks, yogis and people with loads of extra time. It’s for anyone: we’ve established that anxiety and meditation are going hand in hand wonderfully in the fast changing and demanding world we live on. It supports great achievers, stressed-out parents, hyperactive kids, athletes, performers, inventors, artists, executives, salespeople, craftsmen, people who want to heal physically or emotionally, and anyone who wants to find inner peace. That’s right: meditation has gone mainstream, with good reason!

Meditation is not only a treatment of anxiety, it is also a preventative practice.

When you practice regularly, in a very short time, you will be blown away by how less reactive you’ve become to life’s upsets. You’ll be thinking more clearly and easily seeking out the solutions to any challenges that confront you.  You’ll be the calm and confident ‘YOU’ unphased by whatever dilemma is going on around you.

All that, just by “sitting and doing nothing!”

“At the end of the day, I can end up just totally wacky, because I’ve made mountains out of molehills. With meditation, I can keep them as molehills.” ~Ringo Starr