As people it is quite easy for us to create a whole convincing reality in our heads. How do we know the difference between the actual truth and ‘a truth?’ When we experience anxiety, it is relatively simple to respond to that uncomfortable feeling from a negative perspective. By default we automatically go into fear, we convince ourselves that something awful is going to happen, since anxiety was a response to and created from unpleasant past experiences. We will naturally gravitate to our default setting, a defense mechanism that was put in place by our subconscious as a way to keep us safe, that is its job and it will carry out the task at hand regardless.

The subconscious knows nothing about linear time and is still respond...

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The point of this title is not to minimise or play down the impact anxiety has on the sufferer, far from it, rather to explain the ‘nature’ of anxiety and just why sufferers become so entrenched in the cycle of fearful thoughts and symptoms that is the quicksand of an anxiety disorder.

I specialise in anxiety and I understand only too well how debilitating anxiety can be, how it blights lives and can leave sufferers mentally exhausted, self-medicating with tranquillisers and alcohol and in some cases unable to leave the house for fear of an anxiety attack.

However, one of the worst things about suffering from anxiety is that whilst anxiety always begins for a reason: a prolonged period of stress, emotions you ha...

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One of the first things I tell a client is this: the subconscious mind doesn’t understand time. Linear time simply does not exist in the subconscious. I feel it’s really important to understand this as it explains so clearly the irrational fears, phobias and anxieties that plague the individual whose lives in the present are actually in pretty good shape. They may be happily married but plauged with fears of their partner leaving them, despite their other halves consistent reassurances. They may be thriving at work but left sleepless at night with irrational fears of facing the chop. All too often people have good lives but for the deep undercurrent of ‘generalised anxiety’ that leaves them fully unable to enjo...

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