Closing The Five Doors To Anxiety

Every year the Universe becomes more fully understood. We now know about dark matter, Buckminster fullerenes and quarks (whatever they are). I don’t need to know, they won’t affect my life. Nevertheless, someone must understand them. Someone needs to figure out how they relate to the big scheme. This is the principle of divide and conquer; no one can know everything; we develop specialisms and then share what we learn over the proverbial dinner table.

I have spent a very long time working on the problem of clinical anxiety. Clinical anxiety is different from everyday worry or feeling a bit anxious about an upcoming company event. Clinical anxiety is a problem that can come to dominate and then ruin your life. It is bad for your physical and mental health. The study of anxiety is one of my specialisms and I want to share some of what I have learned with you.

Anxious all the time?
You have to travel towards anxiety.
To be anxious you have to travel towards anxiety and accept it into your life. This is never a conscious choice but nevertheless, a choice you have made. The way anxiety is created is that your brain decides that something (it can be anything) is dangerous to you. The ‘conscious you’ is not normally aware of this process. But your brain creates the belief that this thing is dangerous and then whenever it or variations of it are encountered you feel threatened. This is anxiety in a nutshell.

An example that is hard to believe but is all too common is the experience of anxiety created from being successful or by being good at what you do.

Do you feel good enough?
Let us suppose you harbour the deep-seated belief that you are not good enough. This is a nebulous feeling that really has no basis in fact but you allow it to exist in the deepest vaults of your being. For a while this deep and not overtly acknowledged feeling drives you to work hard and learn about what you do. This naturally makes you successful. As you become more successful the responsibility you gain increases but your workload also increases. This puts more pressure on you to do a good job because that is your only guarantee that your deepest negative belief will not surface and take human form to be seen by everyone. This is your threat. This is the threat that creates your initial general anxiety!

As time goes by your threat gains some strength because you allow the feeling to exist without it being overtly challenged. You feed it with some attention and you increasingly suspect that it may be true. This is your journey towards clinical anxiety.

Then something happens that shakes your confidence in yourself. You start to wonder if your deepest negative belief is genuinely true. This process of worrying and trying to understand why you feel so on edge creates your experience of clinical anxiety. Thereafter, whenever you feel challenged, stressed or overworked it brings you into contact with your own personal anxiety trigger.

All of this is very straightforward and although the specific example will be different for everyone, many tens of millions of people travel this route yearly. It is incredibly common.  But don’t despair, clinical anxiety is very treatable and there are many things you can do to reprogram your brain to stop creating clinical anxiety for you.

Your anxiety journey

I have helped over 1000 people with clinical anxiety, depression, OCD, trauma, PTSD and many other problems in a long clinical career.  Over that time I have been able to synthesize the most common psychological processes that lead to clinical anxiety. I call these the 5 Doors. 

I have identified 5 doors that you pass through on the way to anxiety. As you pass through these doors they open onto more and more possibilities for anxiety to exploit to increase your feeling of vulnerability.

As we identify each door we can do a little work, retrace our steps, and then close the door on anxiety. When all five doors are shut then anxiety has been conquered.

The Five doors to anxiety

DOOR ONE:
Have you developed an intolerance to uncertainty? Do you NEED to be sure about things to feel safe.  Do you NEED to be in control of processes and people? Would someone call you ‘a control freak’?

DOOR TWO:
Have you fallen into the trap of confusing unproductive worry with productive problem-solving? Do you go over the same problem over and over again? Do you check everything over and over? Does it take you a long time to complete something? Do you feel certain that if you let any errors get through then that would be disastrous?

DOOR THREE:
Are you familiar with catastrophic thinking? Will everything be a disaster, will it all turn out for the worst? Disaster and catastrophe is guaranteed to get the attention of your brain. Catastrophic thinking focuses your attention on the numerous (fictitious) reasons you need to be anxious. It just never happens. So, your system is constantly on high alert for threat that never comes to pass.

DOOR FOUR:
Strange as it may seem but you probably avoid emotional upset. Do you avoid confronting emotional problems? Would you prefer to walk away if you feel annoyed, upset or provoked rather than say something? Do you avoid confrontation because of the unpleasant emotions it might cause? This is avoidance of the normal emotions that flow through life.

DOOR FIVE:
Do you sometimes think you have a physical problem? Does it seem unbelievable that the things you struggle with could all be caused only by anxiety? How can anxiety cause pins and needles in your arms? How can anxiety cause tightness in your chest? How can anxiety make you feel like you are going to collapse?  Well, it does because your system remains on red alert for threats. Can your physiological arousal go through the roof at the drop of a hat, while it can take hours to settle back down again? As you well know this is very unsettling.

How to close the 5 doors
Each door needs to be closed individually. By closed I mean that you understand why the door has been opened and you have the tools in place to close the door whenever it threatens to open again.

We start by recognizing when the doors open. You will see below The Closing the 5 Doors to Anxiety Worksheet. This acts like a diary and helps you to see the 5 Doors processes in action. I suggest you complete this for at least 5 Days and of course, more is better. Below the Worksheet, you will see that I have completed a worked example of the Worksheet so you can see how to fill it in.

You may find that, at first, it is hard to recognize the doors as they open. This is because you are so used to living with them that they seem invisible. Unseen psychological processes are the most dangerous because irrespective of whether you are aware of them or not they act upon your life, distorting your experience and creating misery. So, learn to see the 5 Doors in action. This puts you in a powerful position to be able to challenge and change them.

Closing The Five Doors To Anxiety Worksheet.

 Closing The Five Doors To Anxiety Worksheet:  Worked Example

Now that you have gained more awareness of the 5 Doors I want to introduce you to a very powerful tool used by clinicians the world over to challenge and change negative beliefs and their associated emotions.

Closing The 5 Doors 

Challenging and changing a negative belief and its associated emotion

First

Identify your most negative belief (thought) and then rate how true it feels for you.

Most negative belief (thought) about myself

How true the belief (thought) feels 0........................................10

                                                   Not at all                       completely

 In the film, I use the example of ‘I am a failure.’

Second

Establish if the belief (thought) is true, accurate or valid.

 It is true (hard evidence)         It is not true (hard evidence)   

Third

Create an alternative to the untrue negative belief (thought). In the film I decided that ‘I am a good person and do a good job’ was true and was therefore the opposite of the negative belief ‘I am a failure.’

Options that you might want to try are some of the below.

I am safer than I feel I am

I am a better person than I feel I am

I am a good person and I do a good job

I try my best and I work hard

I have more power and control than I feel I have

I deserve more care and respect than I feel I do

Fourth

Say your mantra to yourself 200 times per day in 10 blocks of 20 repetitions.

Remember to say it under your breath, hear it and think it at the same time.  Aim for a total of not less than 1,400 individual repetitions within the space of one week; after you have completed what you can do proceed to step 5.

Fifth

Now re-score the negative belief (thought)

How true does the belief (thought) feel now 0........................................10

 Not at all                        completely

Do you notice a difference? How different are your scores on the same negative belief?

There really is no alternative to putting in the work of retraining your brain. This way of doing things permanently changes the internal processes that I have been calling Doors!

The example you have been working on is very likely to be one of a cluster of negative beliefs about yourself that are themselves all Doors, but Doors of a particular kind; those associated with what you believe about yourself.

Now that you know how to do it you can select a different negative belief and go through the exercise again. Don’t get bored with doing it, persist and you will see the benefits.

What does it mean to retrain your brain?

Everything you know, think, do, feel, imagine, experience, and achieve is organized by your brain. In terms of you as a physical human being, there is nothing else. Your brain does it all. Let’s simplify things. Your brain manages the complexity of being you by trying to automate as much as possible thereby using less brain power to get things done.

Anything you have done more than once is managed by a brain program, this is what I mean by automation. Programs allow for automation and energy saving. The problem of anxiety comes about because your brain is not necessarily focused on doing what is good for you. If you are in a life-threatening situation and want to stay alive it is focused on immediate survival but your brain is also capable of suicide if it discerns that this is what you are focused on and hence want.

I often think that our brains are pretty ambivalent about our health, even to the point of negligence. It is pretty obvious that our brains are quite willing for us to do things that are bad for us, even life-threatening. Think about smoking of any kind, including drugs. Drinking to excess, gambling to excess, dangerous activities, over-eating, not exercising, getting into fights, unsafe sex, being anti-social, isolated, and sad.

So, what is your brain trying to achieve by allowing these things? I think simply put; your brain is intent on giving you what you focus your attention on. Irrespective of whether it’s drugs or being upset and violent. Whatever you focus your attention on you are likely to get more of. Therefore, when you focus a lot of attention on anxiety you get more of it. This is why coping strategies only take you so far. They help you to cope with the consequences of focusing on anxiety. But it is only by changing your focus and retraining your brain to stop accepting anxiety as normal and therefore to stop focusing on anxiety that you will you see real long-term benefits.

If you want to know more about retraining your brain follow this link where The Anxiety Wizard Program is explained. 

https://www.drpurves.online/offers/jHFWSVLH