Treating generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), despite being difficult, can be successful. To be successful, though, you need to stick to a few simple guidelines. The first guideline you need to stick to is to surround yourself with recovery. This is probably a new idea for you, but don’t worry – in a while I’ll explain what this concept involves, and you’ll see it’s not complicated at all.
To fully understand “surrounding yourself with recovery” we need to look at its opposite: “surrounding yourself with negativity.” “Surrounding yourself with negativity” is when most of your time is spent on the negative aspects of your generalized anxiety disorder: being around other people with anxiety problems, visiting forums and websites about anxiety, reading books on how to overcome your anxiety.
Doing this stuff makes your mind get locked in an anxiety trap that it’s hard to break free from. You start feeling and experiencing the weight of other people’s anxiety problems, and this can be awful; it’s difficult enough just dealing with your own problems. When this happens, this is a typical case of surrounding yourself with total negativity. You don’t want to be in a place like this, because it can single-handedly prevent all the progress you’d otherwise be making.
So if that’s “surrounding yourself with negativity,” what’s “surrounding yourself with recovery” and how is it different? It’s essentially avoiding everything that I outlined a moment ago: so stop talking to others who are suffering with anxiety right now, stop visiting online forums that focus solely on anxiety, and stop reading books that focus on your anxiety as it is right now.
Guess what? If you can stop doing these few things, you’ll no longer be surrounding yourself with negativity. So that’s half the battle won. But how do you then move onto surrounding yourself with recovery? The answer, thankfully, is easy: you take everything you’ve been doing until this point, and you begin doing the opposite.
Instead of being around people who are suffering with anxiety problems of their own, surround yourself with people who suffered with anxiety in the past but have since recovered. Instead of studying forums and message boards that are full of people suffering with anxiety, visit forums and message boards that are full of people who’ve had generalized anxiety disorder and overcome it.
These things are simple, I know, but they work. Trust me. These things will lead you away from negativity and towards recovery.
We tend to get what we think of or focus on. So it makes sense to put all your energy and focus on people who’ve been where you are now and turned everything around.