What if you didn’t have Anxiety? What if you just THOUGHT you did? …

How often do we become overwhelmed and anxious due to everything that is happening around us? We constantly feel the need to worry and over analyse situations, and we believe that this is necessary in order to take control of what happens in our external lives. However, what if I told you that the anxiety that you are experiencing is just a series of THOUGHTS, and that you can get rid of this anxiety just by changing the way you manage the thought process in your head? Would you believe that it is that simple?

In our minds, the world is what we think it is.

Those who are anxiety ridden convince themselves that this is the way their external life is. They usually feel that worrying will protect them from the events that they have imagined, as it might make them less likely to happen. However, this creates a blurred perception of the real world. The issue is that when we try to look at the real world with this outlook, we are not seeing what is really happening. We are creating an illusion by making things up that are not there, and this has an impact on the way we live our lives. We are living in a world of thought, but we can not distinguish this from reality. We believe that the thoughts that we are making up in our own heads are really happening in the outside world, however this is not the case.

“A man will be imprisoned in a room with a door that is unlocked and opens inwards as long as it does not occur to him to pull rather than push.” – Ludwig Wittgenstein

It is important to realise that our experience in life is constructed from what we are thinking. We have to learn that not every thought that passes through our head is true. We do not have to believe our thoughts, and not all of these thoughts belong are important. In most cases, they are just passing through our head and the sooner we realise that we are no longer scared of these thoughts, the quicker they will start to pass through and diminish. Just like it's the nature of clouds to pass in the sky its also the nature of our thoughts to pass in our mind. It's never the first thought that makes you feel anxious or stressed or depressed. It's the hundredth or thousand, the ones you meditate on for a long period of time. Within that time there are hundreds if not thousands of other thoughts that just come and go. They pass and we don't emotionalise them because..Well- they're just thoughts! When you start to realsie this at a deeper level you soon come to realise that we live in an inside out world and not the other way about and it's our thought about life that create our emotions. Anxiety will soon become a distant feeling – once you learn that you do not need to react to your thoughts, your life experience will change forever.

What can you do to make a change?

When you are in situations when you feel stressed and anxious, STOP and ask yourself the question – “Is it really this situation that is making feel anxious, or is it just my thoughts about the situation that is the problem?” It is important to remember no matter how hard a problem can seem, you are never more than one thought away from having a completely different life.