Treatment of generalized anxiety disorder can often be totally successful, but only if you stick to some basic, sensible guidelines. The first of these fundamental guidelines that should always be followed is to “surround yourself with recovery.” The idea of “surrounding yourself with recovery” is probably pretty new for you, but in a moment you’ll fully understand this idea, and more importantly, you’ll understand how to stick to this fundamental guideline and cause your recovery to go into overdrive.
To fully understand “surrounding yourself with recovery” we need to look at its opposite: “surrounding yourself with negativity.” “Surrounding yourself with negativity” is when most of your time is spent on the negative aspects of your generalized anxiety disorder: being around other people with anxiety problems, visiting forums and websites about anxiety, reading books on how to overcome your anxiety.
Doing this stuff makes your mind get locked in an anxiety trap that it’s hard to break free from. You start feeling and experiencing the weight of other people’s anxiety problems, and this can be terrible; it’s difficult enough just dealing with your own problems. When this happens, this is a classic case of surrounding yourself with complete negativity. You don’t want to be in a place like this, because it can single-handedly prevent all the progress you’d otherwise be making.
So now you know what the idea of surrounding yourself with negativity is all about, now you need to know what surrounding yourself with recovery is all about. Basically, at its core, this is about avoiding everything I mentioned just now. So no longer talking to other people who also have anxiety problems at the moment, no more visiting forums full of people who are suffering with anxiety, and no more books that are focused just on living with anxiety.
If you do nothing but end these fundamental things, the problem of surrounding yourself with negativity will quickly become history. But once you’ve achieved that, how do you go about surrounding yourself with recovery? Simple: you just do the opposite of what you’ve been doing up until now.
So rather than hanging around others who are suffering with anxiety and panic, hang around with people who suffered with anxiety in the past but discovered a way to beat it. Rather than hanging out at message boards full of people with anxiety, hunt out forums that are full of people who had anxiety disorders but found a way through them.
Rather than reading books that center on how to stop your anxiety, choose books that were written by people who genuinely lived with the problems themselves and found a way to stop it. This fool proof approach will quickly lead you away from surrounding yourself with negativity and lead you towards surrounding yourself with recovery. Very quickly indeed you’ll be in much better mental shape.
People generally get what they think about and concentrate on, so putting all your resources into the people who were once where you are now but solved their problems has to be a great idea.