Coping With Anxiety Disorder Is Not The Same As Overcoming Anxiety Disorder

Video Transcript

Coping With Anxiety Disorder Is Not The Same As Overcoming Anxiety Disorder

I know I talk a lot about the two parts of anxiety, the behavioral part and the physical part, which is our symptoms. And I do that because we want to be sure that we're addressing the right problem. I hear a lot of people talk about, "Wow, you know, my anxiety is up this morning or my anxiety feels bad today."

Now, are you talking about your behavior of worrying or are you talking about the physical symptoms? Because, again, they are separate from each other. While, they occur together because the behavior drives the stress response, which creates the physical feelings, they aren't one and the same.

Anxiety, which is the behavior, causes the physical part, which is the symptoms. If you want to get rid of the symptoms, all you have to do is reduce stress, contain your anxiousness, you know, not worry about your symptoms, and over the course of time, as your stress comes down, your symptoms will subside.

But one of the problems I see quite often is we get that sort of cycle going where we're going along, our life is good, and all of a sudden, we have symptoms. You don't know what they are.

We start to worry about them. That worry creates more symptoms. We go to the doctor, the doctor doesn't know what's going on and our worry fuels the symptoms and we get that cycle going with worry fueling symptoms. So what we want to do is stop the worry about the symptoms. They're just symptoms of stress that will resolve when you reduce your stress.

So if you just do that, contain your anxiousness. Don't worry about your symptoms. They'll be there for a while. As you get your stress down, they'll disappear. Contain your anxiety, reduce your stress, and you'll get rid of the physical part of anxiety, which is the symptoms.

Now, overcoming anxiety requires going after the behaviors, and we have a lot of them.

Over the last year or so, we've compiled about over 100 common anxiety behaviors that drive stress. And so over the next few months, we're going to be talking about those behaviors. And hopefully with that information, you'll be able to identify those for yourself and work on them so you can overcome anxiety because coping with anxiety is not the same as overcoming anxiety.

I coped with anxiety for 12 long years and it was awful. It wasn't a good experience. But once you overcome anxiety disorder, you don't have to worry about anxiety again.

So again, there's a difference between just coping with anxiety and dealing with anxiety. I recommend dealing with anxiety so you can get on with your wonderful life without anxiety and its symptoms being a problem.