The Secret Power of Focus | Anxiety Recovery

 In terms of anxiety recovery, focusing on the symptoms of your anxiety is one of the absolute worst things you can do. But unfortunately, it is the thing we most want to do. We constantly want to check in on the intensity of our anxiety, our heart palpitations, our head fog - we want to check in on all these sensations to see how we’re feeling. So, I’m going to talk about why we’re always checking in with our sensations and give you a step-by-step method to stop checking in.

For those of you who don’t know my story - I had anxiety for nearly two years when I was in my early 20s. During that period, my anxiety was pretty much all I thought about. I became obsessed with checking in on my symptoms. From the moment I woke up to the time I fell asleep, there wasn’t a minute that went by that I wasn’t scanning my body and paying attention to every little sensation. I’d check with my head fog, heart palpitations, and derealization. 

On top of that, I was so afraid of my anxiety that I was constantly worrying about it. I’d worry, “What if I have a panic attack in the car?” “What if my derealization is really a sign of a brain tumor?” “What if I’m stuck this way forever?” These worries and fears would swirl around my head. I’d try to stop them - I tell myself to quit worrying about it and do something else. But then a few moments later, I’d experience other physical sensations and my brain would go right back to worrying about my anxiety. It became so bad that I couldn’t concentrate on anything. I couldn’t do any work at my job, I struggled to hold conversations, and I couldn’t enjoy time with my family and friends. My mind was always consumed with anxiety and I felt like I couldn’t control my brain. Not only that, but at times, I felt like I was going insane. 

Alright, so why do we become so obsessed with our anxiety? Why are we constantly checking in and worrying about our anxiety? Well, the answer is one single word: fear. Like I was, you have become afraid of your anxiety, and don’t worry because this is unbelievably easy to have happen. You become fearful of what sensations your anxiety is going to produce, how it’ll make you feel, and whether you are stuck this way forever. These are normal fears when you are suffering from severe anxiety. But here’s the thing, the fear of anxiety is unlike most other fears. Most other fears have clear ending points. You become anxious and afraid of the speech you have to give in front of 50 co-workers, or the final exams you have to take, or that marathon you are about to run. It is easy to become anxious and afraid of all these things, but all these things have a clear and definitive ending point. You give that speech, take those exams, and run that marathon. Then, the fear goes away, and your brain goes on to focus on other things.

But anxiety, it is different because, until now, it hasn’t ended. It shows up whenever and wherever it wants. Not only that, but it can come out of nowhere and hit you like an absolute freight train. So, as a result, you are constantly in fear of it. Well, what this fear does is it signals to your brain that anxiety is a threat and so your brain goes on the defensive. It is this fear of anxiety that causes you to try to protect yourself from it. It’s this fear that thinks about ways that anxiety be avoided and drives you to endless search for ways to get rid of it. Not only that, but fear is why you are watching this video right now. 

But here’s the great news: we can overcome fear. We can conquer fear and become fearless, and that’s exactly why this platform is called Fearless Anxiety. Once you become fearless, all of this goes away. You will no longer care about how your anxiety makes you feel, you won’t constantly be checking in with your anxiety, and you’re brain won’t be cycling through an endless number of anxious “what if” thoughts. All of that ends.

And you are going to get to that place and you’re going to get there very soon. One of the foundations to becoming fearless is using and implementing the Fearless Approach. The Fearless Approach is a step-by-step method that allows you to overcome your fear of anxiety by experiencing anxiety in the right way. As a side note, if you don’t already know about the Fearless Approach, then click the link below to get the 5-Step Cure to Anxiety and Panic Attacks. It’s free and it’ll give you a breakdown of the Fearless Approach as well as all the other steps of overcoming anxiety. 

Using the Fearless Approach, you are going to gradually lose your fear of anxiety. But until you have lost this fear, you’re brain will constantly be worrying about your anxiety. So, how do we stop this? How do we stop focusing on our anxiety and constantly checking in? Here’s how we do that. First, implement the Fearless Approach. Second, you must shift your focus away from your anxiety. This is a critical, critical step. You implement the Fearless Approach and then I want you to begin concentrating on something other than anxiety. The goal in this step is to focus your attention away from your anxiety and toward an engaging and immersive activity. In most cases, this means returning to whatever you were doing prior to implementing the Fearless Approach. So, return your focus back to cooking dinner, that work assignment, or running that errand. But what if what you were previously doing isn’t engaging? Then I need you to change activities to something you can really focus on. 

As a side note, I want to stress that I’m not telling you to be constantly busy. Don’t overwhelm yourself by always being active. That can do more harm than good. Instead, what I’m telling you is that I want you to have purposeful engagement during times of anxiety.

Despite having a focus, your brain will continue to try to shift back to thoughts about your anxiety. This is going to happen frequently, particularly at the beginning of recovery. And I want you to understand that this is normal. When this happens, the process is simple: implement the Fearless Approach and gently guide your focus back to the chosen task or activity. That’s it - that’s all you need to do.

The main takeaway I want you to have from this video is that you need to have purposeful focus after you’ve implemented the Fearless Approach. It is during these times of focus where most of the healing of your nervous system will happen, as your nervous system will have the opportunity to begin calming down and desensitizing. That’s exactly what we want.