There are no effective (long-term) strategies for anxiety. If we can’t understand the truth of this simple statement then – very clearly – we just don’t understand anxiety! If we can’t understand that strategies and techniques and ‘tools’ aren’t the way to go then this…
At the heart of anxiety there are two conflicting things, two conflicting beliefs. One belief is that we absolutely have to be ‘in control’ in order to live well and the other belief is that (for whatever reason) we personally just aren’t able to be…
There is a huge amount of misinformation and obfuscation about anxiety going around – the self-help section in any bookstore in town is pretty much guaranteed to be full of it. All of our approaches to anxiety suffer from the fault of being far too…
Nothing the thinking mind does or can do is any help in freeing us from anxiety. We can’t think or strategise our way out of anxiety. We can’t utilise any ‘tools’ to help us overcome it – the reason for this being that the attempt…
Anxiety occurs as a result of the thinking mind projecting limits on everything and the thinking mind always projects limits on everything! This is what thinking is of course, thinking is that process whereby we impose limits or boundaries on the world – if…
How do we start to be mindful, how do we get started being mindful for the first time when the practice of mindfulness (whatever that might be) is not something with which we are culturally familiar? Even the intellectual understanding of what is called ‘mindfulness’…
The main difficulty with anxiety is that we generally try to solve it in ways that make the problem worse; we use exactly same approach that was responsible for generating the anxiety in the first place. The idea that there are some ways of tackling…
There is no such thing as a ‘technical fix for anxiety’. There can be on the short term, to be sure, but only at the price of ‘aggravating the original problem and causing it to rebound onus even more painfully in the future’. The so-called…
Resistance is the single most important idea that we need to grasp if we are to properly (i.e. not intellectually) understand anxiety. Even if we disregard everything else, all the type of more-or-less useless stuff we always get told in anxiety management classes, if we…
There exist certain situations from which it is impossible to escape on purpose – these situations are traps because the harder we try to extricate ourselves the more tightly we get caught up in them. There are many examples of this sort of thing that…