The Fear and Anxiety Solution (2 page)

After several years, the stress of my high-powered job and my growing dissatisfaction with the rather “mechanical” healing approach of allopathic medicine started to drain me. I decided to take a break and accepted a scholarship for a postdoctoral research position at the University of Washington in Seattle, which, after four years, gave me a PhD in molecular biology. My research focused on
apoptosis,
or programmed cell death, which describes the phenomenon in which cells sacrifice themselves for the greater good of the whole organism. This is not a rare event. Every day, about 50 billion cells in our body “decide” to terminate their existence so that the balance of the system remains stable.
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Being immersed in the world of basic research significantly changed my perspective on human potential. As a physician, I was trained to view the body as rather fragile and prone to failure. Science, however, illuminated a simple fact that I hadn’t fully realized until then: each and every cell of our bodies has an intelligence and sheer unlimited potential to grow, adapt, and heal in ways that are still far too complex for us to fully comprehend. The ability of our body to maintain trillions of cells in a delicate equilibrium of growth, healing, and death is truly ingenious and suggests that there is a regulating consciousness that connects and directs all of our cells. For me, the next logical questions were
what is this regulating consciousness, and how can we access and work with it to utilize our innate healing potential as effectively as possible?

By then, I knew I wouldn’t find the answers to these questions in test tubes or the red-eyed Fischer rats that had been my research patients. At the same time, two occurrences significantly influenced my life.

First, I stumbled into a yoga and meditation class, which focused on the subconscious mind. Soon I noticed how the meditations and exercises relaxed and recharged my mind and my body more quickly than anything I had done before. As I deepened my yoga practice, I realized that during the classes I was able to somehow avert oncoming colds or hay-fever outbreaks by simply focusing my mind on the meaning of yoga—the union of mind, body, and spirit.

Second, I discovered Dr. Paul Tournier’s book
Zu Hoeren Koennen (A Listening Ear)
on my bookshelf, where it had been collecting dust since it had been given to me by a close friend fifteen years earlier. As early as the 1940s, Tournier, a Swiss physician, claimed that allopathic medicine failed to consider the wholeness of the human being, which, he said, consists of body, mind, and spirit. Much ahead of his time, Tournier combined medicine and counseling in his practice and frequently invited his patients to his home to sit with him by the fireplace. In this book, he described how his patients, when given the time and space to share the thoughts, feelings, and stories behind their physical challenges, started to relax, open up, and enter into a healing state. Tournier found that these conversations often seemed to accomplish more than the medicine he had prescribed to them.

Having had the privilege of witnessing many similar healing openings in my own practice over the years, I believe that when people have the opportunity to realize and speak their truths, their minds, bodies, and spirits start to realign, enabling them to access their true healing potential.

The longer I studied the mind-body-spirit connection, the more I realized my traditional perspective on health and healing was undergoing a serious transformation. Healing isn’t supposed to be a battle between good and evil or health and disease, where we doctors sweep in like knights in shining armor equipped with powerful and often deadly weapons, determined to “win” at any cost. And the patient isn’t meant to be the battlefield, staying passive and “patient,” still until the war is over.

I certainly appreciate how medicine has benefitted and improved our lives in so many ways. And I have gratefully taken my share of pain medication or antibiotics and will continue to do so when necessary. However, the current paradigm of allopathic medicine doesn’t encourage us to trust or utilize our own innate wisdom and healing potential. Instead it fosters a sense of dependency, disempowerment, and fear of illness. In new mind-body-spirit healing perspectives, illness is not the enemy of health, but an integral component of a powerful organic system, which has evolved throughout hundreds of thousands of years. The primary purpose of illness is to alert us that we are, on some level, distressed and out of balance. To heal and regain our natural state of wholeness—the alignment of mind, body, and spirit—we need to identify and address the deeper root causes of this stress and imbalance. Even more important, we must learn how to take advantage of our innate healing powers.

What is the connecting force—the nexus where mind, body, and spirit meet? And how can we consciously access and leverage this force to promote health and accelerate the healing process?

The key is our subconscious mind—and in particular our emotions, which have the potential to reach every cell of our bodies. How? Emotions prompt the release of neurotransmitters, small peptides that flow through our bodies until they land and dock on the surface of a cell. Like keys opening locks, they can activate certain genes, trigger protein production, stimulate the release of endocrines and hormones, and much more. Studies have shown that positive emotions can boost the immune system, decrease the symptoms of diabetes, and improve heart conditions.
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On the other hand, negative emotions, such as stress, anxiety, and depression, have the opposite effects and can cause serious health problems.
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So to promote health and healing, we need to work with our subconscious minds and stay in charge of our emotions, right? Well, here lies the issue. How many of us have felt overwhelmed by our emotions, especially by fear and anxiety, which can make us feel anything else but in charge? How many of us would rather avoid our emotions than become all worked up by them? And truthfully, how many of us trust our subconscious mind or know how to better understand it?

On the one hand, our subconscious minds are the keys to accessing our innate healing potential. On the other hand, that same subconscious creates emotions,
such as fear and anxiety, that damage our health and well-being. Is there a disconnect within the subconscious? No, but there is a disconnect between our conscious and subconscious minds. We usually interpret emotions, especially those such as fear and anxiety that we deem “negative,” as flaws and weaknesses that need to be overcome, managed, or suppressed rather than understanding them to be the subconscious mind’s means of communicating with us. Consequently “negative” emotions don’t get adequately addressed; instead, they accumulate in our subconscious and eventually cause greater emotional and physical challenges. In other words, the real problem is that we don’t know how to listen or relate to our subconscious, let alone consciously guide and work with it.

Realizing the powerful healing opportunities a conscious-subconscious collaboration could provide, I extensively studied mind-activating modalities such as Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), Time Line Therapy®, and clinical hypnotherapy. In my practice, I developed a “breakthrough and empowerment program” that blends these methods with my knowledge of medicine and science to help people learn to understand, overcome, and utilize the most challenging of all emotions—fear and anxiety.

This book, which is based on my program, approaches fear and anxiety not as problems or disorders, but as symptoms of and information from your subconscious mind when you’re out of balance and alignment with yourself. As you embark on this journey of healing, empowerment, and self-awareness, the processes and tools of each chapter will show you how to bridge the gap between your conscious and your subconscious mind. They allow you to pinpoint and understand the root causes and deeper meanings of your fear and anxiety, provide you with the leverage needed to release emotional blocks from the past, and help you turn up your inner light, so that you can shine more of who you truly are out into the world.

Even more important than the processes and tools you will learn to use is what you discover about yourself and your untapped potential. Harnessing this potential is not about suppressing strong forces such as fear and anxiety, but transforming them into powerful allies, messengers, and healing catalysts that lead to greater confidence, self-worth, and wholeness. The true healer is within you.

I
’M SITTING AT
the desk, and my heart is pounding. My chest is tight, and I have a hard time breathing. My mind races so fast that my thoughts appear as a blur. I know if I don’t calm down now, I’ll look terrible at our weekly work meeting. What if I freeze again in front of my peers? Why do I feel so stressed about that? Why do I care so much what others think of me? Nobody else seems to have this problem. What’s wrong with me?” Finally Steve, my client, takes a breath and says, “I think I have an anxiety problem. How can I get rid of it and be my normal self again?”

Anxiety is the epidemic of the twenty-first century. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, about 20 percent of American adults eighteen years and older are diagnosed with anxiety disorder, which translates to more than fifty million adults.
¹

In this book, I use the terms
fear
and
anxiety
interchangeably and often simultaneously, even though these terms have slightly different meanings. Fear is commonly associated with specific situations and concrete known (or, often, imagined) threats, whereas anxiety is a vague sense that something dangerous might occur in the future. In my experience, people are often more comfortable with calling themselves anxious rather than fearful and vice versa, largely due to the personal associations they have with one word or the other. Because of the similarities in the ways fear and anxiety are created, the responses they produce, and the principles they follow, it seems appropriate to address them together.

Fear and anxiety are primarily perceived as unpleasant internal sensations that signal potential danger: your heart beats faster, your breath shortens, your muscles tighten, your hands sweat, the hairs on your body may stand up, and you might start shaking from head to toe. Reactions can range from apprehension to a full-blown panic attack. Fear and anxiety can appear very abruptly and are often overwhelming.

For example, you may be feeling perfectly peaceful on your way to work, when suddenly you wonder whether you’ve forgotten to turn off the iron at home. The fear hits when you start thinking of all the awful consequences this situation might create. Or, one week before a big presentation at work, the vague undercurrent of anxiety you’ve been feeling noticeably increases. Or, you wake in the morning and anxiety immediately appears, seemingly out of nowhere, ready to take control of your day. It’s as if these emotions happen
to
you, leaving you feeling powerless and out of control.

Commonly, it is not the direct, immediate threat most people worry about, but instead it is the possibility that something awful might happen in the future. You may ask yourself, “What if the iron sets my home on fire and I lose all of my possessions?” What if you draw a blank and forget your lines during your speech? Or, in regard to the free-floating anxiety that appears seemingly out of the blue, what if you fall prey to something that you aren’t even able to foresee right now?

When you stop and think about it, you may be able to rationally address the reasons for your anxiety. If you’ve left the iron on, it’s highly unlikely that it will set anything on fire—and you can always call your neighbors to check that your house isn’t ablaze. If you’re afraid of forgetting your lines while delivering your presentation, you know you can consult your notes as you’re speaking. In the case of the unknown fear, you can tell yourself that, logically, there’s nothing you can do if you don’t know what the fear is about. However, for most people this analytical approach provides only brief relief; soon the next wave of anxiety “attacks,” which shows that anxiety isn’t a rational problem.

The point where fear and anxiety start to interfere with our abilities to function in our lives certainly varies from person to person; however, there are clear indications when these emotions are becoming serious challenges and need to be addressed. Some of these are:

    • Frequently feeling overwhelmed and worried

    • Obsessive thinking, overanalyzing, and ruminating about the worst-case scenario

    • Overplanning and trying to control others and/or outside circumstances