Spirituality and Self Help

In my previous post I wrote about anxiety. In this post I want to elaborate and specify specific techniques to overcome anxiety.

First of all there are basically two ways to treat anxiety:
1) with medicine.
2) other techniques.

If you choose medication even if it helps in the short run, in the long run it harms your body. Every drug has side effects and usually it’s the liver that is damaged. Moreover it makes you psychologically dependent upon the drug and sometimes even physically dependent.

There are easier ways to deal with anxiety.

Treating Anxiety with NLP

The first technique I want to share is called SWISH and it’s origin can be found in NLP. NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming. NLP is basically a collection of methods to treat and help people.The SWISH technique helps change your behavior, for example you can change your behavior when meeting strangers from fearing them to feeling happy. This technique is powerful and with it it’s possible to change almost any undesired behavior.

To do the exercise start by sitting in a comfortable place and close your eyes. Relax as much a possible by breathing deeply. Now create, in your mind’s eye, an image of you just at the moment of the situation you want to change. Make the image as vivid and sharp as you can. Make the colors bright. Include everything that is relevant: the scenery, people around you and their expressions,smell, sounds, touch, etc.

Now create the opposite image make an image where you succeed,where you feel great and you overcome your problem. Make it as vivid as possible, feel your success. Now shrink the success image until it’s very small and change the color of the image to black and white.

Now see the two images together. The fear image fills your entire vision and the success image is behind it. Imagine they are connected with a rubber band. Now as you say SWISH you pull the rubber band back and the small success image throw out the fear image and fills your entire vision. As it replaces the image it becomes colorful and vivid. Make the SWISH as fast as you can. Return the SWISH pattern at least five times with each time faster than before.

You have now trained your mind to focus on the success rather than the fear.

There are times when you remember something you said or others said to you and that makes you feel uncomfortable. Perhaps your are stuck with the memory of your boss yelling at you and you keep rewind it in your mind. In NLP there is an easy solution.

In your mind’s eye watch the entire event as a movie exactly as it happened. Now rewind the movie back see all the characters doing everything backwards. Now watch the movie again but double the speed and add a circus music. Now rewind back even faster and make everyone with really long noses. Rewind back and forth at high speeds and add funny stuff like Mickey mouse ears and voices. Do it at least ten more times with each time faster and funnier.

Now think of the memory again and check your feeling if it’s neutral congratulations you have just changed the emotions attached to the memory. If it’s not neutral repeat the process again as many times as you need.

In my next post I’ll add even more non NLP techniques to deal with anxiety.

Related Articles

1. Treating Anxiety – Even More Techniques
2. Treat Your Anxiety, Free Yourself
3. How to Overcome The Fear of Failure
4. How To Master Your Emotions To Achieve Peace Of Mind