Anxiety is one of the most common and one of the worst mental health disorders. Millions of people have anxiety and continue to be tormented by it.

Anxiety really manipulates and takes over people’s lives. It makes people avoid all the situations that scare them and it holds them back. Many people are stuck relying on medications as their only defense mechanism against their anxiety. Some people go as far as to hide away in their homes, because they’re scared of anything triggering their anxiety.

Anybody with anxiety knows how traumatizing and horrifying it is. They know how strong and uncontrollable and overpowering it is. They can’t just “get over it” or “snap out of it”. Anxiety takes a long time and a huge amount of effort to overcome.

There are various different types of anxieties, and I usually take a slightly different approach to each one. But for the purpose of this article I’ll try to give a general process to start fighting any kind of anxiety.

In order to overcome anxiety you first have to understand how your anxiety sustains itself. If you want to overcome and eliminate anxiety then you have to understand how it keeps itself alive inside of you. It’s almost as if you are becoming aware of how your anxiety “feeds” itself, so you can start to take away its food and essentially “starve” your anxiety.

As I’ve discovered, anxiety sustains itself in 2 main ways:

1. It makes you react in fear to various triggers, situations, circumstances, concerns, experiences and problems in your life.
2. It makes you tormented, traumatized, and tortured by the symptoms of the anxiety itself, feeling victimized by them and wanting them to stop. In other words, resisting them.

Therefore, my process for fighting anxiety is based on taking away those 2 things. It starts with brainstorming everything I can about the particular anxiety. Then I narrow down on all that information and decipher the root cause of that anxiety. Then I change the way I respond to the root cause so my anxiety doesn’t get a chance to react. Lastly, I focus on letting go of resistance to the anxiety, in order to weaken it and eventually eliminate it.

Background Brainstorm

I typically start the process by giving myself some background. This is where you just brainstorm everything you can recall about your anxiety. Grab a pencil and some paper and literally describe anything and everything you can think of about your anxiety.

If you can, try to recall the origin of it. When did this anxiety first manifest itself in your life and how did it start? If you can answer this question, that should really help you understand this anxiety.

Describe how it continued to manifest itself over the course of your life. How has it continued to grow and develop and get worse? It’s always beneficial to perform a detailed retrospection outlining how a certain mental health problem has developed over the course of your life.

Identify everything that affects your anxiety. What triggers it? What circumstances make it worse? What circumstances make it better or easier on you? Make a detailed list of everything that influences and affects your anxiety.

Describe how your anxiety manipulates you and influences your behavior. How does your anxiety manifests itself through you? How does it make you react through your thoughts, feelings, and actions? What kind of effects does it have on your body when you’re really nervous? How does it influence your behavior and decisions?

Just by answering these questions you should start “separating” yourself from your anxiety a little bit. By becoming more aware of it and how it works, it won’t be able to continue acting on a subconscious level. That should help make it loosen its hold on you a bit. The more information that you uncover the less control your anxiety will have over you.

Narrowing it Down

This is where you start to put the puzzle pieces together and get clear on what this anxiety is really about. You basically want to know why this anxiety is even there and what it is trying to do. In other words, you are trying to find out the root cause or the true meaning of this anxiety.

Your anxiety is obviously trying to make you afraid of something. The question is “what?” Therefore, the main question you want to ask yourself is: “what exactly are you afraid of?” or “what is this anxiety really trying to make me afraid of?”

Really narrow it down and be as specific as possible. For example, if you’re scared of heights, what you’re really afraid of is falling. If you’re scared to ask someone out on a date, what you’re really afraid of is getting rejected.

Some anxieties may not be so obvious to decipher, such as public speaking anxiety for example. Therefore, you’ll have to spend some time figuring out it’s true meaning. Some of the information that you uncovered in your background brainstorm should help you to with this.

Recalling the origin of your anxiety should help you answer this question. If you can remember how your anxiety started in the first place that can really help you understand it’s root cause. For example, if you’re intimidated by people with a temper, that can trace back to being bullied as a child. Perhaps as a kid you were scared of getting beaten up by a school bully. Now that same “fear” still remains within you and gets triggered by people of a similar nature, such as a bullying boss at work.

Identifying the triggers of your anxiety can help you with this. Knowing the circumstances that influence your anxiety should help you understand what you’re actually afraid of. You just have to ask yourself “why?” For example, if you have social anxiety, there are probably all kinds of social situations that make you nervous. If you can ask yourself why you’re afraid of each of those situations, that can narrow down on the true meaning of your anxiety.

Observing your thoughts should help you decipher the meaning of your anxiety. Your thoughts typically tell you what your feelings are all about. If you have anxiety there are usually certain worrisome thoughts that trigger your nervousness. Pay attention to these thoughts and that should help you understand what you are actually afraid of.

Keep in mind there might be more than one answer to this question. There might be multiple scenarios or outcomes that could be worrying you. Your anxiety could be trying to make you afraid of a bunch of different things. If this is the case, make a detailed list of everything you’re worried about or afraid of.

Very often you’ll find that your anxieties simply trace back to other mental health issues that you may have. For example, if you have a problem with social anxiety, that’s probably because you care too much about what people think because you have low self-esteem. If you have financial anxiety, then perhaps you have a strong emotional attachment to money. If that is the case then I would suggest you take the time to work on those other mental problems first. That will then set you up to work on the anxieties after.

Once you become crystal-clear on the root cause of your anxiety, the next step is to “change the way you respond” to it.

Changing your Response

Once you’ve became aware of the root cause of your anxiety, you have to change the way you respond to it. You have to decide how you are going to “respond” to whatever circumstance that you’re afraid of. That way you can avoid reacting to it with fear, stress, nervousness, anxiety, etc. The 3 main methods that I use are Un-justifying the Fear, Taking Responsibility, and Accepting the Futile.

Un-justifying the Fear

The first and probably the most commonly used method is to just un-justify the fear. This is where you conclude that your anxiety is completely unnecessary. It isn’t serving a real purpose and you don’t need it whatsoever.

A lot of these common fears and phobias are not even a real danger or threat to your life. There are all these anxieties from social situations, such as peer-pressure in school, dating, job-hunting, and of course public speaking. There are also various phobias of insects and rodents and other small animals. These things might frighten and even terrify us, but we’ve got to remind ourselves that they aren’t a dangerous threat to our life.

A lot of times your anxiety just takes little things that you’re worried about and amplifies the fear, to make it feel like a dangerous threat. Your anxiety basically highlights certain unfavorable outcomes in your life that you “don’t want“, and makes you afraid of them. For example:

• You obviously don’t want to fail a test or exam.
• You don’t want to be late for class or work on any given day.
• You don’t want to get rejected by a date.
• You don’t want to upset or anger your boss.
• You don’t want to make a fool of yourself in a presentation or speech.

But you have to remind yourself that none of these things are a real dangerous threat to your life. There should be a difference between what you’re afraid of, and what you just don’t want.

Taking Responsibility

If it really is something serious or important or even dangerous that you’re afraid of, then the method I use here is Taking Responsibility. This is where we do everything we can to “handle” the particular problem that we’re facing. It’s where we execute caution and control and care, in order to prevent bad things from happening.

If you’re stressed about your exams in school, then study hard for them. If you’re nervous about a job interview, then do your best to prepare for it. If you’re concerned about your health, then try to improve your lifestyle or go see a doctor. The idea is that as long as you’re doing everything you can to “handle” your problems, then the anxiety is serving no purpose.

If it’s something dangerous that you’re afraid of, then you might argue that we need fear to keep us out of danger. In the wild, animals rely on fear to put them in a position to run or fight for their life when they’re attacked by a predator. The way I see it, fear comes in handy if it puts us in a position to “move quickly” in order to help someone in need or save someone’s life. Other than that, I think we can just use common sense and develop certain skills to “mitigate the danger.”

If you’re afraid of something dangerous, such as deep water, driving on the highway, or operating heavy machinery, then you need to develop certain skills and gain confidence in them. Learn to swim, practice driving, or practice operating machinery until you got it mastered. You need to become confident in your ability to “mitigate that danger” in order to protect yourself and everyone around you. Once you have that confidence, then you won’t need the anxiety.

Accepting the Futile

Your anxiety could be being triggered by unfortunate circumstances that are beyond your control. You could be concerned about the security of your job at work and worried about getting laid off. If you’re a student you could be worried about the difficulty of an exam you have to write. These types of scenarios you can try to prepare for, but they are mostly beyond your control and your anxiety serves no purpose.

Your anxiety could be trying to make you afraid of something that’s just unavoidable. For example, you could be nervous about a doctor’s appointment because you’re scared to face the truth about your health conditions. Avoiding the appointment isn’t going to change your health conditions, whatever they are. You’d be better off attending the appointment and receiving any bad news so you can do something about it. Your anxiety is serving no purpose here.

Basically, the whole purpose of Changing Your Response is to come up with a “counter” to whatever it is that you’re afraid of. It’s just a brief explanation of why you don’t need to be afraid of whatever problem you’re facing. If there are multiple scenarios or outcomes that you’re worried about, then you need to come up with a separate counter for each one.

You can even combine the use of the 3 methods if you think they apply. For example, you could be nervous about a job interview coming up. That implies you have social anxiety, which you need to recognize is an unnecessary fear that you don’t need (Un-justifying the Fear). Then you should do your best to prepare for the interview to boost your confidence and better your chances (Taking Responsibility). Then you have to accept that you might not get the job because that is ultimately beyond your control (Accepting the Futile).

You’ll soon see that there’s very little that you really need your anxiety for at all. Your anxiety was simply manipulating you like a puppet, making you react to various things that you didn’t need to. Now you’re starting to take control of your own mind and decide for yourself what you think you need to be afraid of and what you don’t think you need to be afraid of. You’re no longer allowing your anxiety to dictate that for you.

Letting go of Resistance

Anxiety doesn’t just stop by identifying all your problems and changing how you respond to them. Changing your response to the root cause of your anxiety is only about half the work. After you’ve done this, you’ll likely still find yourself overpowered and overwhelmed by the enormous control your anxiety has over you.

The next step is to look a little further within, and observe how you are reacting to the anxiety itself. How are you reacting to the presence of the anxiety just being there, manifesting itself? You have to start to recognize the part of you that is just frightened, horrified, or tormented by your anxiety itself.

Anxiety is obviously a very uncomfortable, unpleasant, unwanted, painful state to be in. Nobody wants to feel nervous or anxious. Most people try to avoid the triggers of their anxiety and run away from their phobias just to prevent this state from taking over.

And because this state is so unpleasant, on a subconscious level, we resist it. We want it to stop. We want it to go away. We feel victimized by it with self-pity. We are essentially afraid of anxiety itself. And this keeps us stuck in a trap where our anxiety continues to sustain itself.

Remember that your anxiety sustains itself by making you react in fear to various problems, circumstances, triggers, experiences, etc. The more scared you are, the stronger your anxiety becomes. Now if you are resisting your anxiety and wanting it to stop, then that implies that you are SCARED of it! You’re scared of your anxiety itself. That just gives your anxiety exactly what it needs to survive and keeps it alive inside of you.

Luckily, there’s a simple solution to this problem. We break free from this trap when we surrender and let-go of resistance to anxiety. We have to gently allow ourselves to fully feel anxiety to the max without any desire to make it stop. Think of it as if you are just casually sitting back and allowing your anxiety to do whatever it wants to do, like you just “don’t care“. And we have to literally get to the point where we’re not bothered by the anxiety’s presence, and don’t mind it being there.

You’ll soon see that part of being anxious is resisting the anxiety. If you are always feeling victimized by your anxiety, wanting it to stop, wanting it to go away, stuck in self-pity, then your anxiety will always be there, because all of that is part of being anxious. But if you can gently surrender into your anxiety, get to the point where you’re not bothered by its presence and don’t mind it being there, are you really “anxious” anymore? Not really, because part of being anxious is resisting the anxiety.

By fully surrendering and letting go of resistance to anxiety we are demonstrating that we’re not scared of it. Then our anxiety slowly starts to lose its control over us and we start to relax our minds. Most importantly we’re now starting to change our mindset to think and feel like we don’t have anxiety, which is key. Once you get this concept, you can use it to do things like stop panic attacks and shut down your body’s fight-or-flight response.

Shutting Down the Fight-or-Flight

Shutting down the body’s fight-or-flight response is a rather tricky and difficult practice that most people struggle with and frankly just don’t know how. But it all comes down to how you mentally react or respond to the fight-or-flight state itself.

For most people, when their fight-or-flight gets triggered, they just react to it with panic and resistance. The fight-or-flight mode is very uncomfortable with the heart beating fast, chest tight, being short of breath and limbs shaking. It’s really painful and frankly just torture. Therefore, when most people go into fight-or-flight, their immediate reaction is to feel uptight, tense, and just freak out and panic.

That panicking and resistance just makes the body continue going into fight-or-flight. Then that just makes you panic even more, which makes the body continue with fight-or-flight. It’s just a vicious cycle, a trap that you’re stuck in.

You have to break that cycle, and that is by letting go of resistance to this state and choosing not to be bothered by all of its pain and discomfort. That will relax your mind and eventually get your body to calm down.

Remember that your fight-or-flight or “Fear Response” is simply how your body responds to fear being present in your mind. Therefore, you have to get the fear out of your mind in order to turn off the Fear Response. If you’re resisting your fight-or-flight then that implies that you’re SCARED of it. But if you are surrendering and letting go to your fight-or-flight, you’re showing that you’re NOT SCARED of it.

From now on, when your body goes into fight-or-flight mode, you have to “change the way you respond” to that state. You have to stop panicking, but instead surrender and let go of resistance to it. You have to drop any desire to make it stop, and just let it run freely. Try to think and feel like you’re not bothered by all the pain and discomfort, like you don’t mind any of it and basically just “don’t care“. Instead of wanting it to stop, you have to want it to keep going, and ask for more!

This is probably going to feel like something very new and different, unlike anything you’ve ever done before. Therefore, I suggest you find a quiet place where you can limit your distractions and fold your attention inwards. Once you’ve done that follow these steps to shut down your fight-or-flight:

1. Sit in a chair or lie down in bed or on a couch. Breathe deep to fill the body with oxygen. You want to continue breathing deep throughout this whole exercise. Close your eyes if you want to further limit your distractions. Now start to look a little further within.
2. Take a minute to observe this uncomfortable state you’re in and describe it accurately. Pay particularly close attention to everything that is actually bothering you. Perhaps your heart is beating fast, your stomach is burning, your throat is sore, you’re short of breath and winded, your muscles are tight, and your head is under tension. By becoming fully aware of everything that is bothering you, you’re setting yourself up for the next step, which is letting-go.
3. Lay-back, chill-out, and surrender and let-go of resistance to your fight-or-flight. Lose any desire to make it stop and just allow it to run freely. Really focus on trying to think and feel like you’re not bothered by all the pain and discomfort that you’re going through. Observe your thoughts, and replace any thoughts of resistance with thoughts of letting-go. Instead of thinking “make it stop!” like you’re being tortured, you want to think “Keep going! Do your worst! Bring it on! Knock yourself out! I can do this all day!”

This is going to feel very counter-intuitive at first and it’ll take a strong conscious will to do this. You’ll be consistently tempted to resist and “freak out and panic” about all the pain and discomfort. It’s tricky, but you have to keep focusing on letting-go to it. And by letting go of resistance to the fight-or-flight state, you’re showing that you’re not scared, which will start to relax your mind.

If you can maintain this state of “no resistance” and relaxation in your mind for at least a few minutes, your body will eventually respond to it. Your heart rate will come down, stomach will settle, muscles will relax, you can catch your breath, and the whole fight-or-fight mode will subside.

The very first time you try to do this will probably be extremely difficult, and it will take a ton of focus and concentration. But it should only get easier each time you do it, and your anxiety should get significantly weaker. This is a skill that you’re going to have to develop, to shut-down your body’s fight-or-flight response. That is not with alcohol or drugs or medication, but with your own conscious will.

Putting up a Fight

Overcoming anxiety is an on-going process that requires consistent vigilance and voluntary efforts. In your daily life you have to start monitoring your state of mind for anxiety. Become more aware of the mood you’re in and “catch” yourself whenever you feel nervous. Then you’ll want to decipher the meaning of it on the spot and ask yourself “Why am I anxious?”

Identify what triggered the anxiety, whether it was an external circumstance or a thought in your mind. Narrow down on what the anxiety is trying to make you afraid of. Then change the way you respond to that trigger and “counter” the anxiety. Remind yourself why you don’t need to be afraid of this thing.

That alone is sometimes enough to control the anxiety. However, if you still can’t control it then you need to focus on letting go of resistance. Gently, allow yourself to fully feel the anxiety, and drop any desire to make it to stop. Stop panicking about your body’s fight-or-flight and just surrender and let it run freely. Eventually, your mind will relax and your body will calm down.

You also need to start viewing all the problems in your life as opportunities to work on yourself. Anything that scares you, anything that stresses you out, and anything that makes you nervous, is an opportunity for you to fight anxiety. Instead of running away and hiding from all your fears and phobias, you should be willing to face them head-on. You should look forward to any opportunity you have to work on your anxiety.

That is the process that you’re going to have to get used to doing on a daily basis. You need to be constantly monitoring your mind for anxiety and be ready to fight it at any time. And you have to be constantly looking for opportunities to work on it, rather than running from them. You have to basically “declare war” with your anxiety and swear to fight it to the death. This war could go on for a long time, but every battle that you win should “weaken” your anxiety a little bit. That should give you the motivation to keep fighting.

Going Forward

After you’ve been fighting your anxiety for a while, it’s easy to get discouraged and frustrated and exhausted. You just want the anxiety to give up and die already. Even when your anxiety is not attacking you, you might be uptight and nervous and worried by anticipating when it’s going to attack you next.

That is the wrong attitude to have as it will probably help sustain the anxiety. Instead you need to have a more positive attitude and be willing, ready, and motivated to fight your anxiety for as long as it takes. That will take away any resistance towards the anxiety, and you’ll have a much better chance at beating it. If you can tell yourself that you’re not concerned about your anxiety attacking you in the future and you don’t even care about it anymore, then that should help silence your anxiety and finish it off.

Conclusion

To start working on any particular anxiety, conduct a brainstorm on all aspects of it. Recall how it started and how it continued to grow and develop. Identify everything that triggers it and describe how it manifests through you and influences your behavior. Doing this brainstorm should help separate you from your anxiety and prepare you to work on it.

Then you want to narrow down on the root-cause or the true meaning of the anxiety. You want to decipher exactly what it’s trying to make you afraid of. Some things that can help you answer this are the origin, the triggers, and the thoughts. Once you know the anxiety’s root cause, you can start to evaluate it.

The next step is to change the way you respond to the root cause of the anxiety. You can do this in 3 different ways: You can declare that the fear is completely unnecessary and you don’t need it whatsoever. You can consider the situation serious and important, and do everything you can to handle the problem. Or you can recognize that the situation is beyond your control or unavoidable.

The other half of the process is to change the way you respond to the presence of the anxiety inside of you by letting go of resistance to this state. By doing this you are demonstrating that you’re not afraid of the anxiety itself, which essentially deprives it of what it needs to survive. You can take that a step further by letting go of resistance to all the physical symptoms anxiety has on your body. That will relax your mind and manually shut down your body’s fight-or-flight response.

You need to continue this fight on a daily basis. Monitor your state of mind for anxiety and catch yourself whenever you feel anxious. Identify what triggered it and narrow down on what the anxiety is trying to make you afraid of. Then change the way you respond to that trigger. Let go of resistance to all the discomforts of your anxiety until you feel relaxed. Keep this up and over time your anxiety will just keep getting weaker and weaker.

That is my method for fighting anxiety. This is what I have used to fight my own anxiety and it has definitely helped me transform into a more “chilled out” person. I’m sure that underneath your anxiety is the more relaxed, braver, chilled-out person that you’ve always wanted to be. So, the last piece of advice I can give you is to be persistent and don’t ever give up on it.

Good luck in battling your anxiety.