When Faced With Anxiety

[admin]

WHEN FACED WITH
ANXIETY

Anxiety may be defined as a continuous and pervasive apprehension that can become fear in depth. It is basically an accumulation of irrational mental attitudes. When an anxiety is taken apart, you will find, in most cases, there is not as much to be afraid of as you had thought.

I ALWAYS ENCOURAGE people to visualize themselves hitting anxiety hard with reason. When you employ the power of your mind and unemotionally dissect your anxiety, you can ask yourself if there is any real reason why you should feel nervous and apprehensive. You must realize that you possess an enormous potential power to use cool, factual thought and action.
Take a piece of paper and list everything concerning your anxiety. List the reasons you should be anxious and the reasons you should be confident. For example, start the confidence column with the word God. Under this, write everything about the problem that you can relate to God, which should be just about everything. The more sincerely you do this, the less you’ll have to write in the anxiety column.
Also, ask yourself, “How much sense is there to this anxiousness? How much good is accomplished by my worrying over this?� The more you apply common sense, examining the situation with cool, rational intelligence, the more you will reduce anxiety to its proper size.
For example, suppose you feel anxious about a loved one. The thing to do is to employ every intelligent, logical, protective procedure. Every intelligent person knows there is in this world the element of accident. Accidents can happen to anyone. But our intelligence also reminds us of the comforting law of averages. On the law of averages, accidents happen very infrequently. The chance of anything happening to your loved one is minimized by the law of averages.
There is another law also—that thoughts tend to reproduce themselves in kind. If a person constantly sends out apprehensive anxiety thoughts, he actually tends to produce accident and misfortune. Conversely, if you surround your loved ones and yourself with faith thoughts, protection thoughts, love thoughts—all of which may be called God thoughts—then you encompass your loved ones and yourself with the most powerful protection in the world.
Anxiety is likely to produce what you are anxious about; whereas intelligent faith produces protective commonsense results. Anxiety is like a magnet. It draws unhappy results to itself. But so also is faith. Indeed faith is a much more powerful magnet, one that draws incredible blessings.

Faith is a powerful magnet, one that draws incredible blessings.

Excerpted from Overcoming Anxiety and Fear by Norman Vincent Peale