Anxiety and worry might be the largest contributor to stress that I can think of and stress is the largest contributor to death. If you have any hope of living a healthy and successful life or recovering from an illness or injury, limiting your stress needs to be a priority, and the first step in limiting stress is limiting your anxiety!
We all understand and hear about the power of positive thinking, and how you can manifest dreams by creating vision boards and meditating/praying for what you want out of life.
Worry is like making a vision board of all the things you DONT want.
If you believe manifesting works, then it should terrify you to know that you can manifest the negative even easier than the positive.
When you worry about something, you invite that which you are most worried about into your life.
The good news is that 98% of all the things I worried about in my life have not come to fruition.
The most horrible and hardest things that have happened to me, I never saw coming!
This means that I stressed my mind and body over things that I never had to, and I still had to worry about the stuff that actually happened. I put myself into double jeopardy! This is no way to live and your health and life can improve tremendously if you can just get a handle on stress.
When I was younger, I was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. My mother is and was a chronic worrier and we were raised Catholic, so I didnt stand much of a chance. 😀 As a child, I was prescribed Ritalin to slow my mind down (why this should be done to anyone, is beyond me)
Note to Parents: A hyper mind is a superpower, not a disability. If their teachers can’t keep up, find them better teachers, not doctors.
As an adult, I was prescribed Paxil. The upside of this kind of drug was that I didn’t worry too much about anything, the downside was also that I didnt worry too much about anything. Drugs like Paxil can make you complacent, including in the areas that matter. I found that I showed and felt less empathy, most notoriously to my second wife, Amanda. I didn’t recognize it at the time, but things I should have cared about, I did not. Life was good, and I bought into the silly notion that I shouldn’t have anxiety about anything, and prescription drugs can fix that. I would be interested in how many other successful men and women are taking prescription drugs when they should otherwise be very happy with their lot in life. Unfortunately with my brain blocked off from worry I ignored normal things that I should have been more worried about.
Eventually, I got off Paxil, which is not easy, as it literally sends spikes throughout your brain while you wean off of it. You are tired, irritable, and often confused. The withdrawal I experienced really made me realize what poison I was putting in my body all those years.
Knowing I already have a tendency to worry you can imagine my family’s concern when I was diagnosed with cancer. I wasn’t handling day-to-day anxiety well, and now I had something to really worry about.
The cancer doctors immediately prescribed me Ativan for anxiety. This wasn’t an everyday drug, so I could use it when I felt anxious thoughts. It is fast acting, albeit more dangerous and addictive.
Would you care to guess how many days of anxious thoughts one might have after a Stage 4 cancer diagnosis? The bottle was looking a little light for that purpose.😀
Luckily for me, I had already reconciled my fate in the hospital. I put my trust and faith in a higher power and used gratitude as a way to combat anxiety. Even today when smaller life problems arise, I try to refocus on what is going right and what I can be thankful for and it works better than any drug. I admit I did cave in and take Ativan before scans and while waiting for results but I am always proud to show the doctor that I still have the original Ativan script from 3 years ago.
Gratitude, not drugs, is the cure for anxiety.
As always, my disclaimer: I can only speak for what works for me. My opinion on things like depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues, is that we all are on the spectrum for most of them. I hope that in telling you that anxiety was manageable with $0.00 in the bank and cancer throughout my entire body you might be able to reconsider your own anxiety response to your personal woes.
Matthew 6:27 “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”
I think there are plenty of good reasons to be anxious and/or depressed and we should work first to process and feel those emotions before we go to a doctor. This might be a dangerous opinion, but especially in the case of children, I think it is so important to talk more, and drug less. Further, I believe gratitude fixes both. I do recognize that some people do have a chemical imbalance and for those folks, I encourage medication. I am just using my experience as a child and an adult to point out how on two separate occasions it was simple for me to get those drugs, without a real need.
At a minimum, meditation, exercise, and prayer should be attempted before thinking about drugs, both prescribed and self-medicated.
Without trying those, you aren’t even giving yourself a fighting chance.
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