Episode 005 – Overcome Anxiety: End It Once and For All

Subscribe on: APPLE PODCASTS | SPOTIFY | YOUTUBE | GOOGLE | RSS

Today I want to talk about what anxiety is, where it comes from, and – most importantly – how to change your relationship with it.  If you type “how to overcome anxiety” into Google, you’ll be met with 759 million results – I don’t recommend combing through them.  Not that what you’re going to read is inherently “bad” advice or wrong, but the feelings of overwhelm and anxiety often go hand-in-hand.  So sorting through nearly a billion different nuanced approaches to alleviating anxiety, well, might just cause more anxiety.

But here’s the real issue: while there are plenty of good suggestions out there, very few get to the root cause of why we experience anxiety in the first place.  Even licensed medical professionals, therapists, and the myriad of mental health “experts” out there associate typically aim to “treat” the symptoms – stress, worry, fear – that stem from a “disorder” they consider to be psychological in nature.

So in this post, we’re going to dive deeper into the source of anxiety and talk about proven, grounded, and practical ways to alleviate it when it happens, prevent it from reoccurring, and overcome it altogether.  But first, let’s take a trip back in time.

What 20 Years Of Panic Attacks & Medications Has Taught Me About Anxiety

My personal journey with anxiety began at the age of 17.  At the time, I was dealing with a complex, but not life-threatening, health issue.  I went from doctor to doctor, saw a variety of specialists, and had test after test run on me, resulting in missing about half of my senior year of high school.  

As you might imagine would be the case for an adolescent trying to find his way in the world, the lack of a real diagnosis and “figuring out” what was wrong with me catalyzed into a bad case of anxiety.

I can remember the first time I had a panic attack.  I was on my way home from a training session (I had been gearing up to play college basketball) and got stuck in traffic on the 20-lane El Toro Y exchange in Orange County, California.  For some reason, being wedged between hundreds of cars like a sardine in a can, I was overcome with this feeling of fear and panic.  It made no logical sense, but I felt like I was going to die.  My heart rate skyrocketed, I had a tingling sensation throughout my body, and my 17-year-old self thought: “Well Dave, this is it.  This is the end for you.”

Clearly, I survived.  But as a result of that experience, I developed a fear of having it happen again.  The idea of experiencing the same sensation I felt in traffic that day exacerbated the anxiety I was experiencing.  I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was my first introduction to one of the core ideas we’re going to talk about today:

Your beliefs around anxiety actually perpetuate your anxiety.

Let’s fast-forward 15 years, taking into account that for nearly decades, doctors had prescribed me Prozac, Paxil, Fexor, and a myriad of other medications designed to “calm” my anxious tendencies and panic attacks (yes, they continued)…

At the age of 33, after years of using weed, alcohol, pornography, and other self-prescribed “numbing agents” on top of the anti-anxiety meds I was taking, I realized I was an addict and started working a 12-step program.  It was through that program that I made the decision to get off the drugs – and I mean all drugs – including the medically-sanctioned ones.

After 15 years of having the serotonin receptors in my brain “blocked” from the meds I’d been taking, I experienced complete reactivation of my nervous system – and IT WAS INTENSE.  I felt a full-frontal attack of all the emotions of life that I’d been suppressing for years.  Anger, sadness, overwhelm, joy, and excitement all came flowing back, giving birth to another idea that’s become integral to the frameworks I’m so passionate about that we teach today:

As humans, we have the tendency to accumulate so much tension in the body. But in the absence of a mechanism to metabolize that energy, our body – in its infinite intelligence – presents this build-up of tension as anxiety.

The First Step To Overcoming Anxiety (It’s Not What You Think)

If you’re experiencing anxiety, stress, overwhelm, worry, or even debilitating panic attacks, chances are you want them to stop (of course you do!).  You want them to go away and never come back.  But seeing as anxiety itself is a construct in our own minds, there’s really no place for anxiety to go.  You can try a variety of outlets to channel anxious energy elsewhere – temporarily – or to forget it for a while, but you can’t get outside of your own body.  So anxiety remains there – in its “home”, so to speak.

So let’s start with the truth and what I’ve come to understand about what anxiety really is:

Anxiety is one of the body’s many natural processes of healing.

Over the course of your life, you’ve experienced a myriad of thoughts, beliefs, and emotions – frustration, anger, stress, overwhelm, not having enough time, not feeling good enough, etc.  All of these are dissonant experiences that we experience as negative feelings.  In our work, we characterize these feelings as primal states that activate our nervous system’s sympathetic “fight or flight” response.  But the feelings we typically want to experience are part of our powerful state – the parasympathetic “rest and relaxation” response.

Let’s be clear = you’re never in two states of being at once.  You’re always either in a primal state OR a powerful state, not both.

Now, the only thing that’s causing these states are our thoughts and the meanings we give the experience of our life – not the experience itself.  

Read that again.

So, as you’re out there experiencing life, a lot of your old limiting beliefs from your childhood are coming up and they’re shaping the lens of your experience and causing this “unintelligent” thinking that invokes these primal states.  As a result, your body accumulates this dissonant energy over time.  Eventually, you reach a point where your body can no longer contain this energy.  Years and years of stress, tension, worry, and overwhelm bottle up like a volcano waiting to erupt.

And what does the body do with that energy?

That’s right.  It produces anxiety. It’s become so emotionally constipated with all of this energy in our cells and nervous system and needs to blow off some steam.  So in our body’s innate, infinite wisdom, it’s created anxiety as a healing mechanism to the build-up.  Here’s another way to look at it…

Just think about watching a nature documentary and seeing two animals have a confrontation.  Maybe it’s two bull moose battling for territory.  They clash their horns.  They charge each other.  They might get bloodied up in the process.  It’s a stressful situation and that puts them into a primal state (fight or flight) instinctually.

Now, when that confrontation is over, they’ll shake themselves off.  Maybe they’ll roll around in the snow or wade into a river.  They’ve developed this instinct to offload the dissonant energy, shift their vibration, and reorient their state.  But as humans, we’ve lost that instinct.  We don’t instinctually – or at least not logically – know how to alleviate ourselves of the stress we build up over time.  However, like animals in nature, our body is always working to restore homeostasis – to bring us back to our natural alignment – to return us to a powerful state.

So what happens is that we begin to experience anxiety, but we experience it as if it’s a foreign invader – as if it’s a problem. We don’t experience it as if it is healing like we do when we have a fever.  And therein lies one of the issues with how our society views and “treats” anxiety.  We can all agree that if we’re afflicted with some sort of viral infection or illness, the natural response of our immune system is to raise our body temperature and let the fever run its course.  We know that when a fever “breaks”, our body has done its job to restore itself back to homeostasis.  It’s a natural healing mechanism we all possess.

Well, let me encourage you to think about anxiety as the same thing as a fever.  It’s the activation of a biological and neurological response to rid our bodies of these unmetabolized emotions that have become backed up in our system.  Like the moose having a shake after a turf war, anxiety is our way of ridding ourselves of our dissonant energy so we can come back to a powerful state.

One could argue that the consequences of not ridding ourselves of this accumulation of dissonant energy can become extreme.  Autoimmune diseases, inflammation, neurological disorders, and even cancer could be our body’s response to an overload of tension (aka anxiety) that builds up over time.

Shifting The Meaning You Give To Anxiety 

If we consider the above, there’s really no choice but to see anxiety as a healing process.  Compare that to the meaning most people give anxiety: “There’s something wrong with me…What if this is serious…What if this doesn’t go away…I have to make this stop now.”

But as I mentioned previously, these beliefs – and the meaning we give to the experience of anxiety – actually perpetuate our anxious tendencies.  Our resistance to anxiety only increases the tension we accumulate in our bodies.  We assume that we’re experiencing a “fight or flight” situation, resulting in more dissonance.  So not only are we not allowing the release of tension, but we’re creating even more tension, further taxing our systems, and perpetuating the psycho-cybernetic loop based on a false narrative.

This might be a lot to take in ascertain based on the beliefs you’ve had about anxiety for years.  But allow me to share what helped these concepts to “click” for me after experiencing anxiety myself for many years and trying a myriad of different modalities to overcome it.

“What’s coming is going”

This is the mantra my good friend Mitra Politi gifted to me after a particularly powerful medicine-healing ceremony in Costa Rica.  I was telling him about all of the physical and emotional discomforts I’d been experiencing the night before, and Mitra helped me to see that it was simply the built-up dissonance leaving my body.  

He assured me that what I was experiencing wasn’t some foreign invader or overtly negative energy making its way into my psyche.  Instead, the feelings I was having and the meaning I’d falsely given it was actually just dissonant energy that was already inside of me and, now, it was coming up to the surface to be released.  In fact, what felt like something coming into my body, mind, and soul was actually leaving it – healing was taking place and I needed to allow it.

Now, let’s recap what we’ve established so far…

• The feelings of anxiety occur as a result of the accumulation of dissonant energy in our bodies 
• Our beliefs about anxiety and the meaning we give it perpetuate our anxious tendencies 
• Lacking a way to offload this tension, our body created anxiety to de-metabolize ourselves of the build-up of dissonance 
• Anxiety is a natural healing process and the body is always working to restore homeostasis to put us back into a powerful state 

So where do we go from here?

If you can understand everything we’ve covered so far, recognize that anxiety is never coming, but going, and accept that this accumulation and offloading of dissonant energy is going to be uncomfortable – like a fever – the first step to both overcoming your current experience of anxiety and preventing more dissonant energy from accumulating is to support the reestablishment of resonant energy.

There are hundreds of ways you can do this.  I find that one of the simplest and best ways is to reconnect with nature.  Ground yourself in the “OHM” vibration of the earth by planting your bare feet on the ground.  By doing so, you’re literally releasing the pent-up frenetic energy stored in your body and drawing in the natural, electric, resonant energy of the earth into your system.

Another way to reestablish resonant energy is through connection. For you, it might be going to Church or temple.  It might be doing volunteer work.  It may be as simple as gathering with friends, family, and loved ones more often and sharing their energy and spirit.

Consider the mind-body connection and establishing physical habits and activities that affect your psychological state:

-Eat healthier, organic foods
-Limit screen time (especially before bed)
-Stay away from electromagnetic frequencies
-Practice intentional breathwork and meditation
-Exercise and engage in physical activity
-Practice hot and cold therapy 

These are all things you can do to support your body’s detoxification process and help it to release all of the accumulated resistances and stressors you have become energetically constipated with over time.  It might require pushing yourself out of your comfort zone a little bit.  But if your comfort zone is living in a primal, anxious state, what have you got to lose?

A lot of this comes down to a simple principle…

If you want to be a person who DOESN’T suffer from anxiety,
do what a person who doesn’t suffer from anxiety does.”

Transforming Anxiety Into Expansion Of The Mind, Body, and Soul

Remember that anxiety is not an enemy, but a powerful ally in your journey of healing and growth. Embrace the expansion taking place within you and release the fear of its permanence. This practice goes beyond just overcoming anxiety; it’s a way of living each day with resilience and gratitude. 

As you learn to release the accumulation of dissonant energy as you’ve experienced it, reestablish your connection with the resonant, restore your body’s natural homeostasis, and begin operating from a powerful state, you’ll begin to transform the so-called “challenge” that is anxiety into your personal power.  Be thankful for anxiety, for it opens the gateway to transformation. 

Just remember to embrace this journey one step at a time and know that nothing about it is supposed to be “perfect”.  Your journey with anxiety – and every other challenge in your life – is yours alone.  But when you have the right tools, support, and community on your side, a powerful living experience is yours to claim.  After all, it is your birthright.