Treating generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), despite being difficult, 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 while I’ll explain what this concept involves, and you’ll see it’s not complicated 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.
These things cause your mind to stay locked onto your anxiety disorder. Worse still, you’ll begin to feel the weight of other people’s anxiety problems as well, simply by spending time reading about or listening to their own stories of anxiety. This is “surrounding yourself with negativity,” and it can be extremely damaging. In some cases, it can completely stop your progress towards overcoming your anxiety related problems.
So now you know 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 troubled with anxiety, and no more books that are focused just on living with anxiety.
If you do nothing but stop 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.
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.
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 begin spending your time on recovery instead of the negative things, you can’t help but start moving quickly towards your goal of an anxiety free life.