We start to recover from our anxiety illness when we start becoming less interested in how bad we feel.
Currently, all day every day, we are consumed with our anxiety problems.
Why do I feel so bad? Why am I so tired? I can’t focus. My mind is so busy. I don’t want to go out tonight because I feel on edge. What if I can’t sleep again tonight? Will these feelings ever go away?
On and on it goes day after day.
We are consumed with the way we feel so there is no room in our mind for anything else. Starting to bring some acceptance to the myriad of symptoms we experience slowly starts to create some space in our mind – and allows the brain the space it needs to recover.
You can put this theory to the text.
The only thing that would be more important to your mind right now than your anxiety would be a real life situation or problem requiring immediate attention. If you were confronted with a real life situation which required immediate action – your mind would quickly become consumed with solving this problem. While the situation remained – there would be no room in your mind to contemplate how bad you feel. You would be focused on the task at hand.
When the situation had been addressed – you would realise that for a few blissful minutes / hours – anxiety did not consume your mind. But your mind would quickly return to anxiety when there was nothing more important to occupy it.
This shows us that we remains stuck in the anxiety cycle because our anxiety has become our main focus in life. Nothing is more important to us currently than worrying about how we feel or trying to figure a way out of the misery.
Recovery begins when we begin to practice simply allowing the anxiety to be there.
We feel bad because we are unwell. Nothing more. Let the symptoms of your anxiety illness be there and practice accepting that it’s normal to feel this way when you have an anxiety illness.
Take the focus elsewhere – and little by little the symptoms of your illness will start to subside (this takes time) as your mind starts to recover.
