Anxiety Rx: A New Prescription for Anxiety Relief from the Doctor Who Created It

unfolds, the pain you feel is not coming from the anxious thoughts of your mind but from a sense of alarm stored in your body.

I had relied on relentless worrying and compulsive thinking as a coping strategy. When a psychedelic substance took away my ability to think, I was left face to face with the pain I had spent decades avoiding.

Without the objective curiosity about our thoughts that conscious awareness brings, the mind unconsciously and automatically equates our thoughts (anxious or otherwise) with who we are.

I am defining anxiety and breaking it down into its component parts—anxious thoughts in the mind and alarmed feeling in the body—so we can heal it.

Many people who experience anxiety had a lot of uncertainty in their lives in childhood or at a time they were least able to handle it.

2. There are anxious thoughts created by the mind. The mind is a meaning-making, make-sense machine.

The ego is like an overprotective mother in the extreme. Just as this hypervigilant mother will not let her child explore and have fun playing on the jungle gym for fear of getting hurt, your ego will not let you explore and have fun with life because of the perceived danger.

What is the antidote to anxiety and alarm? Trusting and expressing the love I have for myself and others.

The more we act from the protective self, the more alarm we feel. We can be in protection or in growth, but we cannot be in both—they are mutually exclusive.

The trouble starts when, instead of seeing our worries as merely intrusive thoughts, we unconsciously accept them as true.