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Anxiety is one of the fastest-growing mental health conditions of the 21st century and its effects are often devastating.
It can disrupt your professional and social life, strain your relationships, damage your physical health, cause mental breakdown and, in some cases, even lead to suicide.
While we sense that anxiety is ruining our lives and yearn to be free of it, escape can seem impossible. Why? Because we think there’s only one way out: the hard way.
And, further complicating things, chronic, long-term anxiety can become addictive.
The common misunderstanding is that mental health issues can’t be overcome without vast amounts of willpower and suffering or medication.
But there is another way that can enable you to conquer your anxiety problem swiftly, painlessly and permanently, it’s Allen Carr’s Easyway, a tried and tested method first devised to help smokers quit.
You might well be wondering what quitting smoking has to do with escaping anxiety, but the struggle with anxiety resembles the struggle with nicotine addiction.
Smokers simultaneously want a cigarette and want to quit. Similarly, when anxiety strikes, you experience negative thoughts, emotions and physical symptoms which you want to escape, but are sucked into letting anxiety take over as it feels easier than trying to fight it.
Anxiety is one of the fastest-growing mental health conditions of the 21st century
You know your anxious thoughts are not helping you, yet you cannot control them. You may try forcing yourself to be calm with willpower but that doesn’t seem to work.
Just like a smoker using willpower to cut down or stop, your mind becomes obsessed with the very thing you’re trying to avoid and you experience an anxiety spiral.
It’s as if you’re being pinned down by a powerful monster.
This is often because a part of your brain is addicted to the relief that follows anxiety. When anxiety strikes, it feels terrible. Your heart races, your mind spins, and your stomach tightens.
But what happens when the anxiety finally subsides? You feel a tremendous wave of relief which feels great. Your brain is particularly attracted to this powerful feeling of relief because it comes with a surge of dopamine.
Dopamine is a ‘feel-good’ chemical, and when your brain gets it, it learns to repeat whatever led to that reward, even if it was deeply unpleasant initially. Imagine wearing painfully tight shoes all day. When you finally remove them, it feels fantastic.
The relief is enormous. But would you deliberately put on painfully tight shoes just to experience that relief? Of course not.
Pleasure and fear are the carrot and stick used by Nature to ensure our survival by keeping us safe and healthy. Things start to go wrong when these two ingenious evolutionary mechanisms get muddled in the brain and the result is chronic anxiety.
Anxious people don’t crave anxiety, they crave the relief that comes from escaping it
Therefore, over a period of time, anxiety becomes an addiction not because it feels good but because the relief from anxiety feels good.
The dopamine from the relief teaches a part of the brain to keep triggering the cycle, even though the overall effect is pain and suffering.
British author Allen Carr was once a heavy smoker – until he weaned himself off using his methods
Smokers don’t crave cigarettes themselves but the relief from nicotine withdrawal. Anxious people don’t crave anxiety, they crave the relief that comes from escaping it.
A part of your brain is addicted to the relief that follows anxiety.
Four ways that anxiety ‘tricks’ you
Anxiety has convinced you that if you think, research or check enough, you can achieve total certainty. This is a reassuring trick because your brain craves the comfort of knowing ‘for sure’.
No matter how much you plan, you can never be 100 per cent sure that things will go exactly as expected. Yet the harder you cling to control, the more firmly trapped you remain in the prison.
The Illusion of Progress, the Illusion of Preparedness, and the Illusion of Comfort all promise you control and freedom, but they only keep you stuck.
These illusions feel like solutions, but they only reinforce the idea that control is possible and necessary. To begin your escape from the prison, you need to see through them.
The Illusion of Progress
Anxiety tricks you into thinking that if you think about something long enough, you’ll find a solution – but ‘researching’ or ‘analysing’ is not a productive use of your time.
The reality is that you’re usually just stuck in repetitive thoughts that create the feeling of effort without actually moving forward. In other words, you’re mentally spinning inside a hamster wheel.
The mistake here is confusing mental effort with real problem solving. The truth is 99 per cent of the time, any decision is better than no decision. Even a bad decision is better than no decision. Obsessing doesn’t lead to better outcomes, it just keeps you stuck.
The Illusion of Preparedness
This is the idea that if you mentally rehearse all the worst-case scenarios now, you’ll be better prepared for the future because you will be ‘ready’ when they happen.
You become convinced that running through every possible disaster, obsessing over details, or overpreparing will prevent failure, embarrassment or regret. On the surface, this sounds entirely reasonable.
But here’s the problem: the vast majority of things we are anxious about never happen.
The Illusion of Comfort
This convinces you to do less. Your anxiety will tell you that you should avoid certain situations altogether because you will not be able to control them.
While the other illusions tend to play out in professional or goal-oriented settings (rewriting emails, over-researching decisions, obsessively preparing), the Illusion of Comfort is more likely to affect your personal life. It convinces you that if you stay within your comfort zone, you can avoid rejection or failure and feel safe.
You can get stuck in these anxious loops because you’ve been tricked into believing that overthinking, excessive preparing and avoidance gives you control. But this is just an illusion.
- Extracted from The Easy Way to Overcome Anxiety: Build Emotional Resilience and Boost Your Mental Health by Allen Carr and Robin & Persia Hayley is out on the 1st June, published by Arcturus, priced £9.99 (paperback and audiobook) and £6.99 (ebook)
