298: How Anxiety Works

Understanding anxiety and trauma

Part of my free training I host has 3 key pieces that you need to understand and get right before you will finally experience freedom from anxiety and trauma

They are awareness, clearing, and communication. If you don’t have all of these pieces, you will continue to struggle with anxiety and trauma. If you want to go watch my free training, you can go to my website www.meganhillukka.com and you will find a link that will bring you there.

But I’m going to share about the awareness portion today on the podcast.

Because if you don’t understand how anxiety works or you don’t understand how trauma works, then you can’t even get started in the first place.

I have had many clients tell me that they go to the dr, and all they are told is they have trauma, of they are diagnosed with anxiety or trauma. Most people don’t know how it even functions, or why they are experiencing trauma or anxiety.

I remember the first time I went to a RRT session, I did know quite a bit about anxiety and trauma, but this perspective has completely changed my life and the way I look at anxiety and trauma ,and how I see it’s possible to heal and clear so quickly.

So, let’s talk a bit about what anxiety and trauma are, and why they are so easy to clear quickly.

So anxiety.

If you’ve experienced anxiety, you likely know this feeling of a sensation ,thought, or something that feels uncontrollable and often very large that just seems to take over you. It almost feels like you have no control over it.

And that’s because you don’t, and I will explain why in just a bit.

Many people mix up fear and anxiety. Or think they are the same thing. However, let’s think for a moment together this way. That fear is a response to a real or perceived threat, and anxiety is the response to the fear response.

So, fear turns on when mind reads a danger or threat, and because minds number one job is to keep you alive, it will make sure you are paying attention, and it wants you to get away. So all the bodily responses with fear happen so you can run really fast. And what happens when you want to run really fast? Legs get stronger, thus heart pumps blood to legs, breahting picks up, blood rushes from brain to legs, hyper focus on the threat and getting away. All of those things happen with fear.

And then anxiety is the response that comes from this.

There is more to anxiety that I’m not going to go into right now, but that I do go into deeper in my program Get Rid of Anxiety and Trauma for Good.

But let’s think of anxiety like this, because most people try to calm anxiety down like the symptoms of it. For example, I have racing thoughts, how do I calm racing thoughts down. My heart is pounding, now I need to do some meditation to calm this down. I can’t think, I need to lower my stress level.

All of these are symptoms of what is actually going on. And if you’re like me, I like to not just deal with symptoms, but to go directly to the root and deal with it where it’s coming from. Because if we just deal with the symptom, we just continue to manage the symptoms. And we don’t actually heal anything.

So if we can think of anxiety as the symptom of what’s going on- what’s actually going on then? Mind read a threat, so it turned the automatic built in defense mechnism of the fear response on. And then anxiety happens when the fear response becomes dangerous, but why in mind reading a threat about something that is not a threat?

You probably already know this- that the things that have been causing anxiety are usually not truly dangerous and there’s not usually some sort of action or protection that you have to take.

And so mind is sending alarm bells over things that don’t need alarm bells right?

It’s like there’s no fire in the house, but the fire alarm keeps going off. There’s no reason for it, but it’s reading danger and trying to protect you.

So what if, in this instance, instead of constantly having to try to shut the alarm bell or fire alarm off, what if we just fixed the alarm bell so it stopped ringing when there is no fire?

It’s the same way in the mind. What if, instead of dealing with anxiety symptoms and trying to calm those down, we just went straight to where it was coming from, which is in the mind, And when you get mind to understand that it doesn’t need to send out alarm bells for this thing, you no longer have to deal with the symptoms all the time.

One thing that’s very different from this perspective and way of thinking, is that when I used to be anxious every day, I would walk around all day wondering why I’m anxious. Where is it coming from. What is making me anxious? And now, when I understand the basic of, my mind is reading a threat somewhere, and I can let my mind know using the correct communication, remember that’s one of the 3 key pieces you need to be able to finally heal trauma and anxiety for good- go watch my free training. But when I use the correct communication to let my mind know that there is no threat, then all the figuring out and taking the time to try to understand why doesn’t really even matter.

Anxiety is so much easier to deal with that it feels. And I want you to hear me when I say this- that it feels out of control because it is. Because the part of mind that is built for survival is going to make you pay attention and make you do things if it thinks you are in danger and things you are going to die. It’s literally a survival mechanism. And so yes- you don’t have control over that. But what you do have control over when you have the right tools, is getting mind to see more clearly what is a threat and what is not a threat, so you don’t have to constantly be triggered in this survival mechanism.

If you haven’t been able to heal anxiety yet, it truly is not because you are lazy, because you don’t want to, or because that’s just the way you are, it’s just because you haven’t had all the right tools, the right communication, and the right understanding of how anxiety and trauma function.

Okay, I said this was going to be trauma and anxiety, but I’m already at the length my podcast episodes are, so I will split this into two, and next week I’ll share all about the trauma portion of it!

Seriously, go listen in my my free training, where I dive deeper into this, you can find it on my website, www.meganhillukka.com