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 weird idea, but once I’ve explained the reasoning behind it, you’ll see why it makes sense.
To get to grips with this new concept of surrounding yourself with recovery, you need to learn 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 suffering with anxiety.
Doing this stuff makes your mind get locked in an anxiety trap that it’s hard to break free from. You start feeling and experiencing the weight of other people’s anxiety problems, and this can be awful; it’s hard 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 position like this, because it can single-handedly prevent all the progress you’d otherwise be making.
So if that’s “surrounding yourself with negativity,” what’s “surrounding yourself with recovery” and how is it different? It’s essentially avoiding everything that I outlined a moment ago: so stop talking to others who are suffering with anxiety right now, stop visiting online forums that focus solely on anxiety, and stop reading books that focus on your anxiety as it is right now.
If you do nothing but halt these basic 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.
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 forums with people who have anxiety, hang out on forums 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.
These things are simple, I know, but they work. Trust me. These things will lead you away from negativity and towards recovery.
Most of us tend to get what we spend most of our time thinking about and focusing on. So when you start 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.