When you need to treat generalized anxiety disorder, it can often be difficult to find a good option. But if you stick to some very simple rules, you can have wonderful success. The most important of these rules is to surround yourself with recovery instead of negativity. This might sound like a unusual idea, but once I’ve explained the reasoning behind it, you’ll see why it makes sense.
To get to grips with this new idea of surrounding yourself with recovery, you need to understand all about the opposite of what this is. The opposite to this is surrounding yourself with negativity. This includes all those things you do that are negative and inspired or controlled by your anxiety: being around other people with anxiety problems, spending time on anxiety forums and message boards, or studying books that focus on living with anxiety.
Doing this stuff makes your mind get locked in an anxiety loop that it’s hard to break free from. You begin feeling and experiencing the weight of other people’s anxiety problems, and this can be terrible; it’s difficult enough just dealing with your own problems. When this happens, this is a typical case of surrounding yourself with complete negativity. You don’t want to be in a place like this, because it can single-handedly prevent all the progress you’d otherwise be making.
Now that you get this idea of surrounding yourself in negativity, you probably already see the obvious way out of this problem: you steer clear of all the things that lead you down this road. That would include not spending too much of your time with people who also have severe anxiety, not spending too much of your time in anxiety-based chat rooms or message boards, and not spending too much of your time on anxiety-related books.
Guess what? If you can stop doing these few things, you’ll no longer be surrounding yourself with negativity. So that’s half the battle won. But how do you then move onto surrounding yourself with recovery? The answer, thankfully, is simple: you take everything you’ve been doing until this point, and you begin doing the opposite.
Here’s how to do that: don’t hang out with people with anxiety, hang out with people who had anxiety in the past but got over it. Don’t hang out on message boards with people who have anxiety, hang out on message boards with people who had anxiety in the past and got over it. Don’t read books about people who have anxiety, read books about people who had anxiety in the past but got over it.
Rather than reading books that focus on how to stop your anxiety, choose books that were written by people who genuinely lived with the problems themselves and found a way to overcome it. This fool proof approach will quickly lead you away from surrounding yourself with negativity and lead you towards surrounding yourself with recovery. Very quickly indeed you’ll be in much better psychological shape.
People typically get what they think about and concentrate on, so putting all your resources into the people who were once where you are now but solved their problems has to be a sensible idea.