In order to have anxiety in life, I like to think of anxiety as a secondary,
tertiary,
or quaternary compounding of an original event that
you perceived to have drawbacks without benefits.
Let me give you an example. It's a story.
Let's say that a mother and father are fighting and they're really having a
knockdown, drag out yelling match.
And the little young boy is having to listen and he goes
around, he watches the mother and father fight,
and there's a lot of aggression and yelling.
And the little boy runs up or runs down under his bed and gets under his bed and
puts a pillow around him and closes off his ears and closes his eyes and tries
to go to sleep, because of the anxiety,
frightened about what the parents are doing, worried about what's happening.
And the next morning it's calm in the house. The dad's gone to work,
the mom takes the boy and takes her grocery shopping.
And now as the boy's in this little basket going down this aisle,
somebody's coming down the aisle, a guy that has brown hair like his dad,
with a mustache like the dad,
wearing a white shirt like the dad the night he was yelling at mommy and being
aggressive, and blue jeans.
So the stimulus that he unconsciously picked up from seeing the dad's
outfit is now as he is going down the aislel,
this man's coming by and seeing that.
And so there's something about him that with causes a withdrawal,
sympathetic response, a withdrawal, an anxious response, a fear response.
So he either does one of two things.
He gets in front of mommy and tries to protect mommy, or gets behind mommy,
either way, fight or flight kind of response and has anxiety.
The man goes by down the aisle and he calms down afterwards,
'cause the man goes away.
They go down another aisle and now he sees another man coming, brown hair,
brown mustache, yellow shirt, blue jeans. And he has a mild response too,
because there's blue jeans and mustache and brown hair that are similar to that
last night event.
And so those are associations made in the brain that's still perceived that
brings up a response, a stimulus response reflex.
And so now he's got the secondary thing of a yellow shirt now added.
So now if he sees a man with a white shirt or yellow shirt,
he's got a secondary stimulus that makes him feel a bit angst. Well,
he goes down another aisle.
Now he sees a guy that's got blonde hair and blonde mustache, white shirt,
blue jeans. And now he has a little bit of an anxiety again,
because now that stimulates from the same original event.
So the primary event that's imbalanced that he didn't see the benefits to and
it's all drawbacks and negatives, which is creating a sympathetic response,
is now being reactivated and associated by kind of like a Pavlovian and Skinner
operate reflex, operate conditioning reflex.
So now he goes around and he keeps adding to secondary and
tertiary associations made with that original event. Now he
hears a person that has a voice like the father or he now sees the same blue
jeans and there's just a small reaction,
anything that might remind him of that thing.
It may be the smell in the room that came from that night that was associated.
And now you get that smell, 'I don't feel comfortable.
I feel anxious.' I've seen so many secondary and tertiary and quaternary
associations made that people are literally walking around living with an angst,
they may not be knowing that it originates from the original event.
So you got a number of ways of doing it.
You can peel back the onion and take each one of those phobias and come up with
balances and reassociate the brain with kind of a recognitive appraisal process.
Or you can go in back to the original event and find the upsides of that event.
Maybe that, they learned that yes,
parents fight and you come out on the other side of it and they get back and
they're close the next day. And that's just part of life. And that's,
and you're living in a fantasy that life's supposed to be peaceful all the time.
It's not.
It's going to have peace and war and positive and negative and support and
challenge and hugs and slugs sometimes. So it's going to ground you.
And if you find the upsides and benefits to that,
you can take away the anxieties right from the beginning 'cause you went back to
the original event. You can peel back the onion and take you back to the event.
Or you can go right to the event and sometimes have a cascading dissolving of
some of those anxieties.
I've done this hundreds of times in the Breakthrough Experience that I teach and
showing people the Demartini Method, I show them how to do this.
So if you're sitting there with anxieties,
just know that they don't have to be there.
You may be choosing to ruminate on this and keep compounding them and running
your story, or you can go back and find out the upsides to the event.
All events have two sides if you take the time to look.
Even the most traumatic events you think and label,
things you think are terrible, days, weeks, months, or years later,
you find terrifics in them,
they can be the catalyst for some greatness in your life. You know,
it's not what happens to you, it's how you perceive, decide, and act upon it.
And you have control over your perception, decisions and actions.
So you can go in there and find the other side of it and neutralize it out and
not live with these anxieties. Or you can let those anxieties run your life.
It's totally up to you. And you have the capacity to do that.
And if you need assistance, come to the Breakthrough Experience.
I show you how to do it.
I teach people that every week and it's inspiring to watch them take command of
their lives.
So that's a little presentation on anxieties in case those are running your
life. They don't have to.