Treating generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), despite being hard, can be successful. To be successful, though, you need to adhere to a few simple guidelines. The first guideline you need to stick to is to surround yourself with recovery. This is probably a new concept for you, but don’t worry – in a moment 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 trap 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 awful; it’s hard enough just dealing with your own problems. When this occurs, 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 now you understand what the idea of surrounding yourself with negativity is all about, now you need to know what surrounding yourself with recovery is all about. Esentially, at its core, this is about avoiding everything I mentioned just now. So no more talking to other people who also have anxiety problems at the moment, no more visiting forums full of people who are suffering with anxiety, and no more books that are focused just on living with anxiety.
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.
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.
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.