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.
All these things have the potential to lock your mind on your anxiety. Even worse, this can often lead to your taking all the weight on your own shoulders from the anxiety-related problems of others. That’s why surrounding yourself with negativity like this can be so harmful. In the worst cases, this negativity can totally stop all the progress you’re making in stopping your anxiety for good.
Now that you get this idea of surrounding yourself in negativity, you probably already see the simple way out of this problem: you steer clear of all the things that lead you down this path. 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.
If you do nothing but stop these fundamental things, the problem of surrounding yourself with negativity will quickly become history. But once you’ve achieved that, how do you go about surrounding yourself with recovery? Simple: you just do the opposite of what you’ve been doing up until now.
So rather than hanging around people who are suffering with anxiety and panic, hang around with people who suffered with anxiety in the past but discovered a way to beat it. Rather than hanging out at message boards full of people with anxiety, hunt out forums that are full of people who had anxiety disorders but found a way through them.
Rather than reading books that concentrate 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 stop 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.
Most of us tend to get what we spend most of our energy thinking about and focusing on. So when you begin spending your time on recovery instead of the negative things, you can’t help but start moving directly towards your goal of an anxiety free life.