What causes Anxiety? This is often a question I am asked when people first make contact to me via the phone or email. I hear people saying “I never use to feel like this”, or “This never use to happen to me”, “I cant understand it, I use to be able to….”: “chat to strangers at parties”, “Go out to the local pub”, “Go shopping on my own”, etc, etc.
Its a big question and the point that we need to understand as human beings is that it is actually our own negative thought processes surrounding the events in our lives that causes anxiety not the events themselves. Wow – so it’s us not them!
Often people blame the circumstances that they find themselves in: “I wouldn’t feel like this if he would only do the washing up once in a while”… The fact is how you think determines how you feel, and how you feel influences the world around you. And isn’t it interesting that when we change our own behaviour, we often find that those things that have annoyed us in the past seem to pale into insignificance!
So what a wonderful thing to know, to understand that it’s up to you/us to make those changes… Some would resist this thought thinking that surely its up to others to change not me! But I see it as a wonderfully empowering thought to realise that if you change your focus to the positives in your life, that your world changes for the better… It means you have the power, and that is one empowering thought!
And big changes start small; a marathon starts off from just one step, what will your little step be to your preferred future?
To read more about anxiety click here