The True Causes of Anxiety

We can cure it when we understand it

Forgive me for a moment if I want to humble-brag. I've helped a lot of people with their anxiety. Some people have seen incredible relief from it. I realize a lot of people are going to be skeptical because there are a lot of bad ideas about anxiety and a lot of myths and misconceptions held and pushed by doctors and therapists alike but I promise I'm telling the truth. Anxiety can be effectively treated even though most therapists don't know how.

My work as a clinician can be partially defined by the fact that I've gone rogue in many regards. I'm unconventional in most regards as to how I go about providing treatment which is one reason why I'm effective while many therapists are not. The standard conventional models for modern mental health treatment aren't effective. Most therapists are repeating the same tired and ineffective methods. They just do the same things without providing results. I believe a therapist has to break away and go rogue if they actually want to help people. I've learned how to effectively treat anxiety because I gave myself permission to break the box.

Over the years I've explored various methods and approaches to treating anxiety and I've found what works. I've also combined my own efforts to manage my anxiety. I had debilitating anxiety through my 20's and 30's. I'm extremely familiar with how it can shut a person down and destroy the quality of their life. I'm also not a stranger to panic attacks and what an awful experience those are. I'm able to help people with their anxiety simply because I've worked on mine and made vast improvements. I'm living proof that you can get rid of your anxiety.

"Anxiety is a symptom, not a problem."

The fact of the matter is, therapists receive minimal education and training about anxiety. If they can help you treat it, it's because they took them time to build that tool box independent of the system they belong to. In this article, I'm going to share the truth about anxiety so that you can better understand it. Awareness is the first step to change. I'm going to debunk common myths and give the truth about anxiety so we can build the groundwork for getting it under control.

Keep in mind, what I teach are lifestyle changes. If you have anxiety that is killing you, you're not going to get much better until you make some personal changes. Therapy should be about change, unfortunately, there aren't enough people out there who understand this.

Myths and Bad Information

There are a lot of myths and bad information out there about anxiety. Most therapists aren't able to offer help and relief for this problem because they don't have a good grasp on it. Most of them buy into the nonsense about it. Let's tackle the myths.

Myth: Anxiety is just part of who you are.

I don't buy into the idea that someone is "just an anxious person." People are the way they are for good reasons. I hate this myth because it implies that you can't do anything about anxiety any more than you can change the color of your eyes when that's simply not true. The myth is that you are powerless to change it or get rid of it and that's just patently false. If you have seen yourself as an anxious person, you may want to make efforts to take a different perspective and tell yourself, "I'm not my anxiety. That's not who I am."

Myth: Anxiety is genetic.

I have often heard people say that depression and anxiety are genetic and they run in their family. I don't believe anxiety is genetic, not for a single second. I believe it's a learned behavior. There is extensive studies and documentation that proves how humans naturally adopt the behavior of the people around them. When you tumble down the rabbit hole of "learned behavior," it's fascinating that creatures, including humans can pick up established patterns of behavior demonstrated by their group or community. Anxiety is genetic, it's learned.

Myth: Anxiety is helpful, it helps you be prepared

This is a major myth held by most anxious people. They think that anxiety is useful and helpful. Clients always tell me that anxiety helps them be prepared for situations. As someone who used to be incredibly anxious, I'm here to tell you that this is completely false. If anything, anxiety creates neurosis. It causes people to be neurotic and paranoid while also causing small problems to look like a major catastrophe. If anything, it makes people less resilient and able to manage or cope with problems. I'm convinced that people believe this myth because of a strange type of Stockholm Syndrome. If you're not familiar with Stockholm Syndrome, it's a phenomenon where people who have been held captive become loyal to their captors. Anxiety holds them captive and they become loyal to their captor.

Myth: There's no 'cure' for anxiety

This isn't just a myth. It's an insidious lie. While the word 'cure' isn't accurate or that helpful, we can't look at anxiety as something we have to live with for the rest of our lives. Don't listen to this, it's just noise.

Myth: Anxiety will eventually get better on it's own.

This would be like saying that your body will eventually get in shape without doing anything. It will only get better when you do something about it.

Now, let's get after the biggest myth and the focus of this article.

Here's the big myth:

Anxiety is a problem that needs to be treated.

Anxiety isn't a problem, it's a symptom.

This may feel like I'm splitting hairs but in order to effectively treat it, we have to know the difference between a problem and symptom. Yes, anxiety causes it's own problems but the truth is that anxiety is a symptom, not a problem. One of the reasons why therapists aren't good at treating it is they see it as a problem rather than a symptom. In most cases, therapists are only treating the symptom so it's no wonder that it never goes away.

When you only treat symptoms, nothing gets fixed. You might find temporary relief but the problem remains unsolved. You can self-medicate your anxiety if you'd like, it can be cheaper than therapy. I'm not encouraging people to self-medicate but why go to therapy if it only treats the symptoms.

So if anxiety is the symptom, what is the problem?

Anxiety can be a symptom of multiple things:

• Overthinking

• Trauma, big and small

• Stuck in comfort zones

• Distorted perceptions

• Bad thinking habits

• An over stimulated mind

• A scattered mind

• Low self-esteem

Let's address each of these individually.

Overthinking

Overthinking is a major problem these days. Overthinking can often be the real problem behind a lot of anxiety. The mental health industry does almost nothing to address the pervasive issue of overthinking and it's profound negative impacts. The more you overthink, the more anxious you're going to be. Learn how to slow your thoughts down. I've seen many people get almost immediate relief from anxiety from just slowing their thoughts down.

I've given clients thought-slowing techniques that include mindfulness, breathing and meditation. After one week of daily practice, clients see a significant improvement. Yes, it take effort. If this is something that immediately turns you away, you may need to rethink your attitude on mental health. It requires effort, plain and simple.

Trauma

I mentioned big trauma and small trauma but there might be a misconception here. All trauma is significant, even if it isn't small. Depending on the type of trauma, it has scattered the mind out in various ways. Some trauma leaves the nervous system in a state of hyper-vigilance while other trauma causes the person to feel broken or incomplete. It's important to understand the difference.

Unresolved trauma will cause anxiety. Unfortunately, trauma is just another thing that doesn't usually get treated effectively in therapy. My go to therapy modality for trauma is Internal Family Systems Therapy or IFS. It's a gentle approach to trauma compared to others which is one reason why I love it. Anxiety will naturally improve then the trauma has less of a grip on you but different types of trauma usually require different types of interventions.

Stuck in comfort zones

When you get to comfortable in life, you build a wall around you and anything beyond that wall will feel uncomfortable, scary and even dangerous. When you become too comfortable, your mind starts to drift into scary and strange lands. It will convince you that normal everyday things are dangerous and horrible when those things are perfectly fine. Even though countless people are able to effectively navigate and overcome these issues, your mind will convince you that, somehow, you are not like those people. That somehow, you are uniquely incapable when it's not true. Thoughts and feelings will appear real and true when they aren't. The longer you stay tucked away in your comfort zone, the more narrow your perspective in life will be when getting outside of your comfort zone will do the opposite.

The solution is to obviously break outside of your comfort zones. You have to do it regularly and consistently. You must do hard things. Comfort can feel good but it can quickly become a poison.

Distorted Perceptions

A lot more people have distorted perceptions which is partially why anxiety has become so much more common. People are tucked away in their reclusiveness, their window into reality is social media when they need heavy doses of reality. It's become glaringly apparent that people are living vicariously through technology and in many cases, the lines between reality and their perception of reality are highly blurred. They see the world one way when it's entirely another.

The more distorted those perceptions become, the more anxious the person is going to be. The solution is to get in touch with reality but one must acknowledge and accept that their thinking and their perceptions might be distorted. Rather than doing things that cause perceptions to shrivel, the solution is to do things that cause the perception to expand.

Bad Thinking Habits

Your mind, in some ways, is like a super intelligent puppy that's never been trained or disciplined. In a perfect world, we would educate children on how to train and discipline their minds while we help them practice it because we've learned to do so ourselves. Anxiety can often be the result of bad thinking habits or a mind that has never been taught, trained or disciplined. Sometimes anxiety is the result of a mind that has just been allowed to do whatever it wants. If it wants hours of staring at social media and we just give it what it wants, it can easily turn into a spoiled, undisciplined child. Overthinking can be one of those things as well, it's something that can happen from having bad thinking habits.

I realize that few people will look at things this way or see their own mind as something that needs to be trained and disciplined. It's an unusual idea but I don't think it's any wonder that we're seeing a pervasive problem of elevated anxiety. Anything that might have helped people have become more disciplined is being and has been systematically removed.

In some cases, people are anxious because they have adopted the thinking habits and patterns from the people around them. Parents and family are the most likely and common culprits. If your parents were anxious, their thoughts and behavior would reflect that on the daily. You would naturally adopt those same habits because that's how we are. As I've already discussed, people naturally adopt the behavior of those around them.

The solution should be obvious. Anxiety can be effectively remedied when we make efforts to train and discipline the mind. I learned to do this through mindfulness and meditation. In fact, meditation completely cured my anxiety. The more consistent I became with meditation, the more my chronic anxiety vanished. I also think it's important to reduce the things that deplete our discipline and makes our minds lazy.

Over-stimulated Minds

Your brain isn't built to absorb so much information which often causes over thinking but it's also trained the brain to be scattered and over worked. Our minds need quiet time where we remain present in the moment. Anxiety is often the result of a mind that is trying to address every piece of information that is fed to it. We often end up putting our focus into things that we have little or no ability to influence and things that have almost no real impact on our individual situations.

We need to stop feeding our brain this kind of constant information. The solution, of course, is to give our brains frequent breaks and to stop over-stimulating it. This is along the same vein as thought slowing that I discussed earlier. There's just so much to be said for mindfulness and being present. Intentionally take breaks from the overstimulation. If you find that taking a break comes with a lot of discomfort, you have to realize that the discomfort is just a feeling and no harm can come from it. Learn to lean into it and sit with it.

Scattered Minds

The standard Western lifestyle is causing our minds to be too scattered. There are several reasons for this but the important thing to realize is that your mind is trying to run in several directions at once and it causes a lot of anxiety and discomfort. Our brains are far to stimulated, that's the bottom line. We receive constant contradictory information and brains can't make sense of it all which causes it to be scattered. Think of the end of a large rope that has come unraveled and is frayed with each individual strand just doing it's own thing. What we want is for the rope to be tied up nice and tight.

In the process of all of this, we are disconnected from our own intuition. We don't take the time to develop it or listen to it enough which causes our ability to discern to fall into a mode of deterioration and atrophy. The more scattered your mind is, the more anxious and dysfunctional you're going to be.

The solution, of course, is to work at gathering it all back. You gotta get your poop rounded up and put it back in a group. Of course it takes time and effort.

Low self-esteem

I left this one for last on purpose as it's far more complex. Low self-esteem basically refers to a persons relationship with themselves which I believe is paramount when we're talking about mental health. I have learned that as long as you have a bad relationship with yourself, your mental health will always be poor. There's no way around that. People with high self-esteem are tough, powerful and resilient. They have integrity because they've integrated the broken pieces back together.

When your self-esteem is poor, you'll always be looking to others to follow or give you direction. You'll have a bad relationship with your mistakes and failures so you'll be afraid to make mistakes. When you're self-esteem is poor, you'll always be worried about what other people might thinking or saying about you as though it matters. The need to control how we're perceived by others is always going to be a losing battle while being extremely low reward.

It's difficult to give a short summary of the importance of self-esteem in one article. Books could be written about this topic including the importance of having a good relationship with yourself because so much comes with it. Increasing self-esteem is an in depth process and one of the ultimate goals of therapy. Or at least it should be though many therapists won't ever even mention it.

The better your self-esteem is, the less you're going to doubt yourself but it's also going to be less painful to look at yourself and engage in some careful self-examination. Self-esteem is what develops in the process of creating better integrity or 'integrating' the broken and scattered parts of yourself. There's a whole process of becoming more whole and self-esteem is the result.

Screen time and anxiety

It's hard to deny the role of screen time and anxiety. I don't think it's any coincidence, whatsoever, that we have seen a massive increase in our collective anxiety at the exact same time that we have seen massive increase of time where people are stuck staring at their screens. One of the first and most important steps in managing anxiety is reducing screen time.

Replace it with reading, mediation, mindfulness, exercising or being creative in some way. Excessive screen time is creating a myriad of issues and we have to begin by admitting that we're not immune to it even though we very much want to be.

In a future article, I want to get in more depth with some ways to treat the real problems behind anxiety. I've already mentioned a few of them. In most cases, anxiety can be drastically improved from some lifestyle changes and some efforts to better train and discipline your mind. I help clients with this day in and day out with positive results. You must understand, however, that it requires effort. This factor alone chases many people away. They want answers in any form other than having to put in their own work but that's not reality.

Thank you for reading. I hope this was helpful. Don't forget to subscribe while you're here.