Another thing it’s important to realise when taking charge of anxiety, is the actual structure of anxiety.

If you were teaching someone how to be anxious you’d tell them to take their mind out into the future and imagine bad stuff happening. So that’s the structure of anxiety.

Neuroscientist Joseph LeDoo puts it like this:

“Where fear is a response to a present threat, anxiety is a more complex and highly manipulable response to something one anticipates might be a threat in the future. It is a worry about something that hasn’t happened and may never happen.”

OK, so it’s important to realise in these scenarios that tend to make us anxious, the fear isn’t real, your life isn’t in danger. It’s imagined. If your life’s in danger that’s genuine fear and you’ve gotta get out of there. But for most of us, we run these scenarios, these mind movies in our heads, and as Mark Twain famously said:

“I’ve had thousands of problems in my life, most of which never actually happened.”

We’ve talked in a past video about how an emotional state like anxiety is just a bunch of chemicals. Well as Joseph Ledoux says, that state is highly manipulable, we can play with the release of these chemicals by asking you to focus on different things.

And in the 7 part course that we’ve put together for you, we do an exercise where you’ll get to experience this for yourself, we’re gonna play with these chemicals using your mind.

You can get that course free of charge at our Home Page.