Acceptance is not an immediate stain remover – in the sense that as soon as you have finally got the right understanding of it in place then all of the pain will just drip off of you. That doesn’t happen. It’s like happiness: you don’t tell yourself “okay, now I’m going to start having a happy disposition in my life.” You’d laugh if someone told you that that was their plan for being ‘happier’. Being happy isn’t a goal – it’s a potential side effect of having other things in your life that moves you forward. But if you only did those other things in hopes that you’d find a wealth of happiness in your being you’d probably be pretty dismal. You’d have to have some independent reason as to why you do them. An example: if you volunteered at a nursing home so that you could feel a sense of happiness you’d probably find happiness elusive. Accepting life as it is doesn’t mean you don’t try and achieve anything, it’s good to succeed as long as it is not to the detriment of your health. People who give up smoking have a strong pull, out of habit, to put a cigarette in their mouth. The ones who finally give up are the ones who allow this habit to be present without indulging in it and then in time, the habit leaves them. It is the exact same principle. The habit to think about and go over the subject of anxiety and how you are feeling may be present, but it doesn’t mean you have to indulge in it. In time, and without your participation, that habit will begin to fall away, and your mind will naturally think of other things. This isn’t to say ditch every notion of acceptance all together…. but more to say ‘be patient with yourself even in your weakness’.

Trust me you will be far better off without the need to carry anything around with you. It takes up a huge amount of mental energy to carry around all these numerous sayings or rituals that you keep having to reinforce and remember. It ends up becoming baggage, stops you from living in the present moment and has you feeling constantly distracted and exhausted. Let go of the need to gather information The question is then , when will my mind reach its natural state after hving been badgered so long by anxiety . When will it reach its equilibrium ? What I was trying to do is perfect all this advice and then constantly monitoring how I was doing. I was trying to use techniques to help me sleep and then fretting about how much sleep I was getting. This cycle went on for a while until I eventually realised that the body falls asleep naturally and that me trying to interfere with that process was making it worse. I was in a cycle of ‘trying’ to sleep instead of allowing it to come naturally. I am not avoiding now. I go everywhere and do everything that I used to do before I had anxiety, as you have suggested.So it was like I told myself I don’t want to suffer like this anymore and I am going to stop doing all the things that make me suffer. And I stopped: putting pressure on myself to be a certain way/ trying to change what was going on around me/judging and blaming myself constantly/ putting pressure on me to recover. And I felt freer. Suffering is so painful and I decided that as I know that I am the one doing it to myself, I am now going to stop doing that. And I can see that I don’t deserve to suffer as I have been. But look at young kids. They have HORRIBLE ‘sleep hygiene’ behaviours and they sleep like angels. They’re up late, running around, fighting the urge to fall asleep and yet they drift off into peaceful slumber. Alz, I have a suggestion. It’s not the actual thought that is scaring you because you already know that it is only because you have anxious energy in your body that that thought is in your head. If you had no anxious energy in your body then that thought wouldn’t even be there. Instead, its the fact that the thought keeps popping into your head and you feel like you have no control over that, I feel like that is the bit that is freaking you out – The fact that it keeps intruding. With that intrusion you feel weirded out because the thought has negative connotations but because the thought feels powerful it evokes a fearful reaction in you. I feel, that if you were to lose the fear response when the thought appears then you would be able to just see it as an anxious thought.

It’s easy to fall into the lie of thinking that certain cases of anxiety or certain symptoms need to be treated differently or mean that you’ll never recover. I think you’ll find that almost every one has thought or struggled with that as some point. But it’s just not true. That’s why Paul talks about just putting everything under the umbrella of anxiety and treating it all the same. This is where any helpful information should take you, it should lead to letting go of certain behaviours, to help you let go and surrender deeper. It should never lead to more fighting, more thinking. or techniques and rituals. Celebrate the fact we are all different; you cannot mould someone into who you want them to be. All attempts will just end up with them resenting you, cause so much conflict and in some cases lead to you losing that person.I can’t tell you how much things changed for me when I let go of all these compulsions and no longer tried to solve myself. When I finally stopped trying to manipulate my inner state, gave up all the information gathering, let go of all my rituals, techniques, and sayings and no longer tried to think my way out of my condition. Let go of the need to fix yourself Paul thank you for your message, but I would be very glad if u could go more into detail with the ‘letting go message’. He was on the verge of ending it all until he looked at his daughter sleeping and a sudden realisation hit him. He finally realised he did have so much to live for and that even with his disability he could still enjoy life. He may not look like he did before but inside he felt like the same person, and that it was only the anger at his predicament that was changing his personality. The irony is that the more you try to overcome anxiety, the more focus and attention you give it and so the brain begins to obsess about it, keeping you in a loop.