Anxiety Wizard Program

I know this is a lot of reading but it is the truth and that has value. 

 Having suffered from anxiety and depression throughout my adult life, and having received substantial amounts of therapy in the past, I found that working through the course material was genuinely life-changing. For the first time, I feel that I understand what stress, anxiety and worry actually are and what causes me to feel anxious and depressed. More importantly, the course has given me some practical tools, techniques and exercises which have helped to significantly improve my mental health. I just wish I had taken the course 30 years ago!

 If you are reading this whilst feeling the world, viewed through the lens of your anxiety and depression is a very dark place indeed, I would give the following advice (with the caveat that I am not a psychologist, just an ordinary person who has suffered from long-term mental health issues and is sharing with you my opinions based on my experiences):

1. Recognise that you are in a bad place and that you can’t really trust your feelings at this time. Your feelings are not facts and you need to use the logical part of your mind as much as possible, however terrible you may be feeling, until your feelings re-align with reality (which is what this course will help you do)
2. Trust the science – the vast majority of people with anxiety and depression will make a substantial recovery – especially if they follow a scientifically proven treatment plan (and you’re in the right place as Dr Purves’s material is among the best there is)
3. The good news is that you will almost certainly get better – the bad news is that there is no magic wand and it won’t happen overnight, Be prepared for some tough weeks and take it day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. It took me 3-4 weeks before I felt significantly better, 12 weeks before I was approaching normal.
4. Don’t beat yourself up! Mental illness is just as real as physical illness (Doctors can measure the levels of chemicals that cause depression and anxiety) – if you had anaemia due to a deficiency of iron you wouldn’t blame yourself, you’d do something about it and get medical help and treatment. It should be the same for a mental illness.
5. Get all the help you can. See a doctor and get signed off work if you’re at that stage where that’s necessary (again don’t beat yourself – the chances are you will be back at work in a few weeks, feeling massively better). If the doctor suggests anti-depressants, I would take them (Dr Purves might not agree with me on this one). However, these are only a short-term solution and the long-term solution is the Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
6. Work hard at the course – if you had a physical illness that caused you to feel as rotten as you do now and a doctor told you that there was a physical therapy that would take about 30 minutes a day with a 90% + chance of seeing a substantial improvement, you’d bite the doctor’s hand off to start the therapy – treat this course in the same way.

 CBT Sessions

 I came to see Dr Purves in a pretty bad state. Since my early twenties, I had suffered from anxiety and depression, generally as a manageable backdrop to my life but with periods when my mental health issues would become debilitating.  I had been treated by various therapists over the years, who had a degree of positive impact, without ever making me feel that my conditions were cured, or even curable. Hence I had resigned myself to a view that my anxiety and depression were a consequence of my mental make-up and the life choices that I had made – in particular my decision to pursue a rewarding career in a competitive and demanding profession. I felt that I would just have to manage as best I could until I reached a life-stage where I felt I could follow a different path.

 However, I reached a mini-crisis at work for no particularly obvious reason, which resulted in my being signed-off sick by my GP and seeking help from Dr Purves.

 At my first session, his questionnaire revealed that I was suffering from moderate/severe clinical depression and moderate/severe clinical anxiety. Not that I needed any diagnosis tools to tell me that. Four weeks and I was scoring mild for both  anxiety and depression and after twelve weeks my scores were essentially normal.

 So what was different about Dr Purves’s approach and why do I believe it has made a far more profound impact on my mental health than previous treatments?

Firstly Dr Purves does not try to be your best mate or a shoulder to cry on. He is a doctor and a scientist and he wants to achieve the best possible outcome (which is of course what you want to!). It’s your life but it’s just his day job and for all his professionalism, I found it very refreshing that he made  it clear that ultimately it’s down to you to put the work in to get better. He can show you the path, but only you can make the hard yards.

1. His approach (which is founded on Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) is highly scientific and evidence-based. As a scientist by training, I respond much more positively to this approach than to some of the pseudo-scientific babble that I have been exposed to by other therapists.
2. For the first time, I feel I understand the causes of my mental health issues and how they have arisen. Psychologists may not fully comprehend the workings of the human mind, but they do have a good enough understanding as to how conditions like stress, anxiety and depression arise to be able to treat them effectively.
3. I learned that a lot of my preconceptions about my conditions were wrong. For example, I was not stressed because I had a stressful job but because of the way I reacted to certain circumstances. My problem wasn’t the 101 things that I worried about but the process by which I worried about them. Most importantly, poor mental health isn’t something I just have to live with, there are active steps that I can take to improve it.
4. And this is probably the most important point. There are some very simple, tools, techniques and exercises that you can do that will significantly improve your mental health. I now spend half an hour a day doing these exercises – it’s not easy, just like going for a 30 minute run each day isn’t easy. And, just like a 30 minute run each day will massively improve your physical health, 30 minutes a day of mental exercises will massively improve your mental health (and actually 10 – 15 minutes might be enough)

I came to Dr Purves in a state of crisis (if you suffer from anxiety and/or depression you will know what I mean). If you’d asked me then what I would have given to be ‘cured’ I would have answered ‘anything’ – life has no quality when you are in that state. The investment in terms of time and money will have been repaid a thousand-fold if I can sustain the improvement that I made over the past twelve weeks for the remainder of my life. Thank you David.

- Jon