Treatment of generalized anxiety disorder can often be totally successful, but only if you stick to some basic, sensible guidelines. The first of these fundamental guidelines that should always be followed is to “surround yourself with recovery.” The idea of “surrounding yourself with recovery” is probably pretty new for you, but in a moment you’ll fully understand this idea, and more importantly, you’ll understand how to stick to this fundamental guideline and cause your recovery to go into overdrive.
To fully understand “surrounding yourself with recovery” we need to look at its opposite: “surrounding yourself with negativity.” “Surrounding yourself with negativity” is when most of your time is spent on the negative aspects of your generalized anxiety disorder: being around other people with anxiety problems, visiting forums and websites about anxiety, reading books on how to overcome your anxiety.
Doing this stuff makes your mind get stuck in an anxiety trap that it’s hard to break away from. You begin feeling and experiencing the weight of other people’s anxiety problems, and this can be terrible; it’s hard enough just dealing with your own problems. When this occurs, this is a classic case of surrounding yourself with total negativity. You don’t want to be in a position like this, because it can single-handedly halt all the progress you’d otherwise be making.
Now that you know this idea of surrounding yourself in negativity, you probably already see the obvious way out of this situation: you avoid 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 forums, 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 around with people with anxiety, hang out with people who had anxiety in the past but got over it. Don’t hang out on websites with people who have anxiety, hang out on websites 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 studying books that focus on how to stop your anxiety, choose books that were written by people who actually lived with the problems themselves and found a way to overcome it. This basic 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.
We tend to get what we think of or focus on. So it makes sense to put all your energy and focus on people who’ve been where you are now and turned everything around.
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