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

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

Anxiety is an endless feedback loop of painful feeling in the body and anxious thinking in the mind.

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.

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.

emotional trauma stored in the body usually generates the anxiety in the mind.

The more unstable the environment in which you grew up, the more your unconscious will take over and do whatever it has to do to ensure your survival.

For many of us worriers, the self-imposed obligation to look after others before we were ready was a way we could feel more like grown-ups and, thus, be imbued with the perception that we were adults—and, thus, in control.

when we are alarmed, we are likely to believe everything we think—and that is disastrous to our mental and physical health.

without awareness, the mind makes an image of the future directly from the past, in a kind of unspoken “Don’t let this happen again” pattern.