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.

three W’s of worry: warnings, what-ifs, and worst-case scenarios?

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.

When we bring our worries into conscious awareness, we also slow them down and bring them squarely into the present moment, and as those worries need to transport you to the future to have any impact, being in the present suspends their power.

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.

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

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.

Anxiety is purely mind-based thinking of projections, expectations, stories, and thoughts of the future. Anxiety is a thinking process, not a feeling one.

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.