There are many “easy”, “painless”, and “quick” or even “instantaneous” ways of overcoming anxiety. If they worked even a fraction as well as they claim to you wouldn’t be reading this. Everyone who had ever had an anxiety disorder would have paid their $99.99 and would now be living a life of abundance, control and pure happiness. Yet they are not. Claire Weekes’ technique might not be easy, but at least it’s effective.
The vast majority of quick and easy cures are little more than gimmicks or money making exercises. There is a simple truth that I advise you to note now and learn to believe in. You are going to get over your anxiety disorder but it is going to involve input from you. That’s what Claire Weekes believes, anyway: there is hard but fulfilling work ahead of you.
Imagine this: a hypnotherapist “cures” you through regression and your life starts to return to normal. Six months later and at thirty thousand feet up over the Atlantic you are suddenly gripped by anxiety and panic! Your phobia has returned! What are you going to do? Grit your teeth and bare it, and wonder how the hell you will get home at the end of your stay? That is precisely why any cure must come from within you, and be in your control.
Let me put it like this. Most people with anxiety are not afraid of flying, shopping malls, underground trains, or anything else. They are scared of anxiety. They are scared of panic. They are scared that they will lose control, go mad, or die. Anxiety feels nasty as does panic, that is their purpose. Remember what anxiety is, it’s nature’s way of telling you that you are in danger, that you need to run away or fight. It is not nature’s way of making you go mad, lose control, or die. It is your body’s strongest protection mechanism and it’s an extremely good one. In your case it has become over sensitive, it reacts too easily and scares you too much causing you to run away unnecessarily. You have become over-sensitised to your fight or flight reflex, you check it repeatedly and if it shows any sign of excitement you encourage it. What is more, instead of reacting to life’s dangers, you have trained it to react to itself. When your flight or fight reflex kicks in it becomes scared of itself, and tells you to run away from it. As you become more scared of your flight or fight reaction, your flight or fight reaction encourages you to escape all the more. How does it do this? By creating more anxiety or panic of course! It is the ultimate viscous circle…
Lets say you are agoraphobic. Some say you need to be less scared of going to a shopping mall alone. I say you need to be less scared of your flight or fight reaction, because it is the harmless symptoms that you are scared off, not the mall.
So what is the answer to this conundrum? How do you escape this cycle and cure your overactive flight or fight response? You start to desensitize yourself not to the object of your phobia (such as a shopping mall or metro train) but to the symptoms. Claire Weekes says that when you are no longer scared of the symptoms of anxiety and panic you will necessarily no longer suffer from anxiety or panic attacks. The only time your anxiety or panic will return is when you actually do need to run away (or fight!). Which is quite natural. And as anyone who has been in a situation where they truly had to fight or flee will tell you, in such situations you don’t actually feel anxiety or panic as such, you tend to focus on the danger.
There is no great difficulty in desensitizing yourself to the symptoms of anxiety and panic, no trick, and no gimmick. An Australian doctor called Claire Weekes (now deceased) researched it years ago and wrote several seminal texts on it and also presented various radio programmes that were broadcast in several countries.
There are many books by her available but you don’t need to read them all. I have selected the best books and tapes/compact disks. They alone are enough to allow you to completely control your anxiety, without expensive therapy, drugs, gimmicks, or false promises. I warn you though, these books are not “quick fix” cures or instantaneous. As I said at the beginning you have to work hard but what you will achieve will be with you for the rest of your life. And unlike the gimmicks these books and CDs will work precisely because you have to work. These books/CDs will open your eyes and lead you an exciting path to cure where you are in control!
