U R OK
by Mira and Charles on September 29th, 2009Here, fast, is the quickest, simplest, most effective way to lower anxiety. This is what you do…
1. Understand that anxiety is your listening to yourself tell yourself a story about how you are not going to be OK. “You won’t be able to pay your bills and you’ll lose your house. NOT OK!” “The wings will fall off the plane and you’ll plummet to earth. NOT OK!”
2. You’ve gotten all too good at telling yourself stories about how you will not be OK. That’s how you get stuck in anxiety. How could you not be anxious if all you do is tell yourself stories about how you will not be OK?
3. The solution—obviously!—is to start telling yourself how you WILL be OK. You don’t fight the not OK stories. You just say to Mr. Anxiety, “Alright, now, you’ve had your chance. I’m not going to argue with you. But now you have to shut up while I tell myself how I will be OK.”
4. And that’s what you do. Whatever it is that’s provoking your anxiety, you give yourself specific, thought-out reasons for how you WILL be OK, how things WILL turn out OK. You tell yourself the most specific, compelling story you can about how you will find a way not to lose the house, why the wings will not fall off the plane.
You may not be great at this at first. Don’t worry about it. You will get better. But the cool thing is that just by focusing on how you will be OK, you will start feeling OK. The more you do this, the better you’ll get at it, and the better you’ll feel.
We call this Finding Your OK. It is the destroyer of anxiety. Do it. You’ll see how good you feel.
