Treating generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), despite being difficult, can be successful. To be successful, though, you need to stick to a few simple guidelines. The first guideline you need to stick to is to surround yourself with recovery. This is probably a new idea for you, but don’t worry – in a while I’ll explain what this concept involves, and you’ll see it’s not hard at all.
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 loop that it’s impossible 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 happens, this is a classic case of surrounding yourself with complete negativity. You don’t want to be in a place like this, because it can single-handedly halt all the progress you’d otherwise be making.
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 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 start doing the opposite.
Instead of being around people who are suffering with anxiety problems of their own, surround yourself with people who suffered with anxiety in the past but have since recovered. Instead of studying forums and message boards that are full of people suffering with anxiety, visit forums and message boards that are full of people who’ve had generalized anxiety disorder and overcome it.
Instead of reading books that concentrate on how to beat your anxiety, read books written by people who’ve already had anxiety and overcome it. These simple things will get you away from “surrounding yourself with negativity” and take you into the land of “surrounding yourself with recovery.” You’ll be in immediately better shape, and immediately put yourself on a much more healthy path that leads towards beating anxiety for good.
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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