Don’t let anxiety control your life with Paul McKenna’s methods.

If I could only give people one ability out of everything I’ve learned, it would be to turn off anxiety and go into a state of instant calm at will. This is because one of the biggest problems facing the world today is too much stress and anxiety. After the advent of Covid-19, a psychological pandemic began, but most people do not have the skills to deal with these feelings. Two chaotic years of lockdowns and disruption, followed by economic turmoil, uncertainty and the horror of war in Ukraine, have led to anxiety becoming a background theme throughout our lives.

Millions of people have trained their brains to quickly jump to worst-case scenarios.

With this tsunami of anxiety came all the physical and psychological effects you would expect to see associated with it, including depression, insomnia, bad or bad moods, and mental obstacles to people fulfilling their potential.

Anxiety, fear, panic, stress and anxiety are all part of the defense mechanism that keeps us safe. I use these words interchangeably because each is a product of the fight or flight response we inherited from our ancestors.

An ancient part of the brain called the amygdala is responsible for processing feelings of threat and fear – it’s a kind of vigilant guardian of your brain. When he sees threats or even potential threats to you or your ego, he takes action.

When this happens, we produce huge amounts of lactic acid and adrenaline, blood rushes to the limbs, the digestive system stops and the immune system suffers, so you can throw everything you have, either fight or flight.

Such anxiety is exhausting. If you are constantly in a state of heightened alertness and fear, you will end up overreacting to everything and eventually making mistakes, bad decisions, and this can even lead to burnout. It also means that you will never truly enjoy life.

If you consider yourself an anxious person, I want to tell you something really important: you are not bad and you are not broken. You have just acquired some unwanted habits in your thinking and behavior, and everyone in the world has done it at one time or another.

One of the problems that anxious people have is that they can’t imagine life without anxiety, and even the thought of reducing it means lowering their guard, which leads to more anxiety!

When people get stuck in this state of mind, they go in ever smaller circles until they are emotionally exhausted. This is because the unconscious mind is illogical, it is purposeful, and its goal is survival.

Everyone experiences anxiety at some point. However, people who consider themselves “anxious people” have made it part of their identity. The NHS describes anxiety as “a feeling of unease, such as anxiety or fear, which can be mild or intense.”

From the moment they wake up, anxious people overthink, worry about problems (both big and small), imagine scenarios that could happen, and replay them over and over in their minds until they turn into disasters.

Fifty percent of the reasons people go to the doctor are stress-related or usually related in some way.

So, as a first step, I would like to make a distinction. Caring, preparing, anticipating potential problems and preventing them at the pass are functional ways of thinking and acting. Anxiety is different.

If you’re anxious from the moment you wake up and can’t relax because you think that if you do, you’ll somehow miss something and it’s like the end of the world, or if you can’t switch off, then you are suffering. from worry.

If you constantly replay disaster movies in your head or have a constant feeling of foreboding and a lump in the stomach, even when everything is going well, you still worry because you tell yourself that this will not last long and the disaster may be just around the corner, then that too is real anxiety.

The good news is that the answer to this problem is actually very simple – and I’m going to show you step by step how to reduce anxiety and lead a more peaceful and confident life.

Together we are going to reprogram your mind like a computer.

You may find that after the very first technique you start to feel better, but don’t worry if you don’t, as each technique builds on the previous one.

So, whether you start noticing positive changes right away, or whether you need a few tricks, the changes will happen at a pace that suits you. While the methods are effective on their own, when you combine them together, you can have a cumulative effect. They will help you achieve an optimal state of mind where you can see opportunities everywhere and be resilient and optimistic.

Remember, it’s okay to be a skeptic – I’m a skeptical person, I like to test things and try them out before I decide how well they work – and many of the methods in this book were once considered “alternatives”, but are now becoming part of the mainstream.

Today I want to show you how to achieve immediate relief from anxiety using deceptively simple yet amazingly effective Psychosensory and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) exercises. where touch and visualization change your feelings.

Freeze Frame Technique

Read this technique over and over and practice the entire sequence as many times as you like until you’re sure you remember it well enough that it’s almost automatic when you really need to use it. First of all, check your level of anxiety on a scale of one to 10.

1. Be aware that you are experiencing a feeling of stress in your body or that your mind is racing.
2. Put your hand on your heart and focus your energy on this area. Take at least three slow and gentle breaths into your heart, focusing on the feeling of the hand in the center of your chest.
3. Now remember a time when you felt very, very good – a time when you felt love, joy, or true happiness! Go back to that memory as if you were back there right now. See what you saw, hear what you heard, and feel good about yourself.
4. When you feel this good feeling in your body, imagine that your heart can speak to you. Ask your heart how you could take better care of yourself in this moment and in this situation.
5. Listen to what your heart says in response and act as soon as possible.

While freeze frame works very quickly, thought field therapy—or “tapping” as it is more commonly known—is more complex and is part of the psychosensory therapies family.

Many people use this method when they are feeling anxious or panicking about a particular problem. It takes a bit of practice to learn this sequence, but research has undeniably shown that it’s incredibly good for managing anxiety.

Scientific studies have shown that when we use the TFT tapping technique, we reduce stress-causing chemicals in our body and induce states of relaxation and calmness. We are also changing the way our brain processes thoughts and feelings. The effect of tapping in a certain sequence, which I will share with you, is to reset the way your brain interprets and responds to stress, thereby changing the internal structure of your brain.

Push or TFT

Before you start, just take note of how stressed you are. I would like you to rate your stress on a scale of one to ten, where one is the lowest and 10 is the highest.

This is important because in a moment we want to know how much you reduced it.

1. Now take two fingers of either hand and touch the following points on the body about 10 times while continuing to focus on the feeling of unhappiness:
2. Touch the side of your palm (karate point).
3. Click on the index finger of the same hand.
4. Tap under your nose.
5. Press on the front of your chin.
6. Click on the opposite index finger.
7. Touch the side of your palm (karate point).
8. Press under the eye.
9. Tap on your collarbone.
10. Touch under the eye again.
11. Touch the clavicle again.
12. Place your hand in front of you and touch the back of it between your ring finger and little finger.

Now keep thinking about the feeling of unhappiness as you do this and each of the following steps:

1. Close your eyes and open them.
2. Keeping your head still, keep tapping between your ring finger and little finger and look down to the right, then down to the left.
3. Keep pressing and rotating your eyes 360 degrees clockwise and now 360 degrees counterclockwise (unless you suffer from motion sickness, in which case skip this snippet).
4. Now hum the first few lines of “Happy Birthday” out loud.
5. Count out loud from one to five.
6. Once again, hum the first few lines of “Happy Birthday” out loud.

Stop and check – on a scale of one to 10, what number are you feeling unhappy right now? If there are almost no unwanted feelings, congratulations. If it hasn’t decreased enough yet, simply repeat the tapping sequence until it does.

• Adapted by Matt Nixon from Worry Free by Paul McKenna (Welbeck, £14.99). Visit expressbookshop.com