Fearing and avoiding social gatherings
Avoiding networking events where you won’t know anyone
Avoiding bridges, highways, tunnels, driving, flying
Feeling a strange and rising form of anxiety as you increase the distance from your house or other safe place
Not wanting to drive more than X miles away from home
Avoiding crowds
Avoiding being alone
Fearing certain thoughts that you try to not have
Freaking out when you feel a certain sensation or symptom in your body
Freaking out because you have certain thoughts that you deem as “not normal”
Not wanting to work out because then your heart rate will go up, you’ll get a ton of sensations and you don’t like them
Limiting your career because you fear change
Limiting your career because you feel like an imposter, as if people will find out you don’t belong there at that level
Relationship troubles because you become needy or jealous too easily
This is, of course, in no way an exhaustive list. Your mind is so creative that you can fear just about anything you can imagine.
It’s clear that this is the form of anxiety we’ll need to work on. I’ll focus a lot on how to deal with good anxiety, how to prevent it from becoming bad anxiety, and how to swipe bad anxiety off the table later on in this book.
Please don’t skip ahead though since it’s important we lay the foundation first. That’s what we are doing now. Part of what will help you overcome your anxieties and panic attacks is the knowledge you’re getting right now in part one.
Causes of Anxiety
Now that you know how the anxiety system functions, let’s go over the most important causes of anxiety, so you can start to eliminate some of them. Good anxiety has a very clear and simple cause: something real is threatening your life, your health, or someone or something you care about. The danger or the enemy in these cases is clear and the threat is imminent! It is real; it’s 100% certain that the bad thing will happen and the fight-or-flight will be needed, right now. Just about anyone else put in that same situation would feel anxiety and fear.
But what causes the different forms of abnormal, bad anxiety I’ve been discussing throughout this book so far? Some people think it’s hereditary, or that it’s caused by a trauma that happened in the past, a trauma they spend weeks or months digging after in therapy. Others have been told by their doctor they have a chemical imbalance in their brain that can only be fixed by taking anti-depressants.
Well, it turns out there are a myriad of possible causes. The more present, the higher the chances that you will suffer from anxiety and possibly even panic attacks. That’s why there isn’t a cure-all for anxiety and panic attacks. That’s why medications fail to deliver adequate long-term results. This is also the reason why digging in your past to find the cause won’t get you very far either. Anxiety is induced by many little causes that, all combined, will turn your smile upside down.
In what follows, I’ll go over these causes, critique some faulty reasons you should not pay attention to, and give you some techniques to deal with them before we dive into the major anxiety busters in part two. We’re almost there.
Let me repeat that there’s nothing wrong with you. You might have wondered why you’re not like other people who seemingly have fun all the time, go out, have great experiences, and simply don’t suffer from anxiety. We both know those people only share perfect and often staged moments from their lives. Nobody feels perfect all the time; nobody has the perfect life. That said, there are indeed people out there who can better deal with anxiety than you can at this time.
As you’re reading through what follows, whenever you realize I’m talking about you or something you do, please write it down—preferably in a journal that you’ll use throughout this book. What you recognize and write down will be one of your causes then, one you’ll need to pay attention to in the future as you’ll be overcoming your unwanted anxiety. Every cause pushes you toward anxiety to some extent (some more than others). The more causes you stack upon one another, the higher the chances of developing an anxiety disorder and getting panic attacks. The more causes you eliminate, the brighter the skies will be again.
Your Body
While I was overcoming my panic attacks, this part is what took me the longest to figure out. When I grew up, I drank a bottle of Coke per day. I even had one next to my bed. Water was for fish, I thought. I ate a bag of Doritos every day and anything else I wanted. Everyone else did it too according to the commercials I saw on TV, so who was I to be different?
When I talked to my doctor about my panic attacks, he never ever asked me what I ate or drank. Then one day my dog Amadeus got sick. He had a swollen head and wasn’t his happy self. I took him to the vet right away.
As I put Amadeus on the table for further examination, the vet asked what I had been feeding him, before he even checked him out. Puzzled, I answered the question. It turned out I was giving Amadeus too many treats and leftovers that weren’t supposed to be for dogs. Even though his weight was fine, it was creating inflammation and problems in his body.
“If nutrition can have bad effects on my dog,” I thought, “I’m sure what I eat will have significant effects on me too. So why did my own doctor never ask me what I ate and drank?” Take it from me and the thousands of people I’ve been able to help; what you eat and drink has a major impact on your body and how you feel!
Yes. Your anxiety and panic attacks may partially be caused by what you are eating and drinking. And we’re not talking about calories and your weight here. What you consume has a profound effect on your emotions and feelings. Just look at what alcohol can do to people. I’ll give you a big one right away:
Caffeine
Caffeine will raise your stress level, will make your nervous system more sensitive, will mess with your body clock, and in short, will act like adrenaline in your body. It is also one of the major causes of adrenal fatigue.[2]
Caffeine will keep you sharp, alert, and super focused. That’s great for some of the population that would otherwise be sleepwalking. But people more prone to anxiety like you and I will get so sensitive and tense that it won’t take a lot to get actual anxiety and even a panic attack. Small amounts of caffeine in itself will probably not cause the panic attack; it will just make it super easy to get one!
That’s one of the reasons why chocolate should be off limits too; even pure 100% cacao. It not only contains caffeine, it also has amounts of theobromine, a substance that can raise your heart rate and make you jittery.
If you’re currently consuming more than two cups of coffee, tea, or anything else with caffeine per day, gradually decrease your intake to zero. Don’t go cold turkey or you’ll suffer from pretty bad headaches for a couple of days.
And if you think, “Nah, that can’t be it! I’ve been drinking it for ages.” Please prove me wrong by giving it a try. Go to zero for four weeks and then introduce it, you’ll feel straight away what caffeine has been doing to you.
The Elastic Comfort Circle and Avoidance
The comfort circle is like an elastic band that can be stretched out yet will become smaller again when you stop pushing its boundaries.
Everything inside of your personal comfort circle feels totally normal and doesn’t require you to deal with any fears or anxieties. Simple things like brushing your teeth and getting water to boil are within your circle, I hope. Clipping the toenails of wild alligators probably is not.
Everything that’s outside of the circle requires a more serious effort. It’s new, uncertain, or even downright scary to you. Learning to cross a busy intersection when you were driving a car for the first time was, at that time, outside of your comfort circle. And now, if the fear of driving is not your fear, driving in all kinds of traffic patterns falls well within the circle.
If you want to be comfortable doing anything that’s currently outsi
de of your comfort circle, you’ll need to put in an effort and stretch the edge of the circle. This is hard, because the closer you get to the edge, the bigger the anxiety and resistance will grow. Your body is trying to warn you of the potential danger. The trick then is to feel the anxiety but not be stopped by it. Keep persisting.
Most of the fun in life lies on the other side of that fear.
This is why avoidance is a cause of anxiety and panic attacks. Avoidance is merely a short-term solution. If doing X gave you anxiety or a panic attack, what better way to not have a new panic attack than by avoiding performing X ever again, right?
This is not the solution as we’ve seen. Your comfort circle, given that it is elastic, will get smaller and smaller. More and more events or experiences will start to scare you, consequently you will have to avoid them too and before you know it even replacing a roll of toilet paper might raise your anxiety. This is a downward spiral and one of the biggest mistakes I made myself. It was the reason why what started with tiny moments of anxiety eventually gave me full agoraphobia where I stayed at home as much as I possibly could. As I was avoiding what scared me, the elastic comfort circle was rapidly closing in on me.
Avoiding whatever scares you gives it power. Power it should not have! By avoiding it, you’re acknowledging that it is indeed dangerous and that the anxiety is legitimate. That’s exactly the opposite of the solution.
I understand avoidance can be very rewarding. It has the instant miracle effect that it can take your anxiety away and prevent panic attacks.
Trying to control everything belongs to this chapter as well since it is a form of avoidance. “I must make sure I have an aisle seat” or “OK, I’ll go, but I must be sure that there are restrooms nearby” or “Before I say yes, let me Google street view the entire location so I can prepare” or “OK as long as someone is with me or is standing by so I can call them.” You can fool yourself into believing everything will be fine because you can meticulously foresee and plan every possible outcome, every possible thing that could go wrong. But what if you still miss something?
Well, the good news is your life will never ever be boring if you live it with that mindset of trying to have everything under control. Needless to say, this will directly feed your anxiety and will wear out your sensitive nervous system even more. Things will almost never go as planned.
But the deeper message I’d like to pass on is that there is no need to even have everything under control. It is not the location, the situation, or even the people that creates the anxiety and possibly the panic attack. It is you and I. We do it with our thoughts.
Having everything under control doesn’t help you to control the actual anxiety, it merely gives you a few less reasons to launch the anxiety alarm. But it’s still there, and it will be very sensitive as soon as something doesn’t go as planned, which will always happen.
There is a better way, and we will deal with it in part two of the book. For now, please understand that the concept of controlling everything and staying within your comfort circle to avoid anxiety are major causes of generalized anxiety.
Shame, the underlying cause
As I was sitting in a restaurant with some colleagues, the waiter placed my plate in front of me. Delicious odors of the tagliatelle frutti di mare I had ordered wafted to my nostrils. I took a bite and enjoyed it. Then, seconds later, a wave of nausea entered my body. My stomach refused all further service, and my mouth started to water. “Am I going to throw up?” I wondered anxiously.
Let’s take a step back. The nausea seems to be the cause of the panic that was about to descend upon me.
But was it really?
“Djeezs, why is this happening now? And look, my plate is still SO full. I can’t stop eating now! If I do the waiter is going to ask me what was wrong with it. I’m going to hurt the feelings of the chef! Well provided this was not a frozen dinner he just warmed up, but still, my colleagues... Look at them eating away! Why am I not like them? They’re having fun and are enjoying this... What if I now have to throw up right here? That’s the end of my career for sure. That’s the end of my dignity! My other option is to ask to be excused and run to the restrooms. But still, that’s not perfect either because who does that in the middle of his meal? And my mom always warned me to never run in restaurants! Come on, Geert, that’s not normal behavior, and these are no longer normal thoughts to have! Be frickin’ normal for a change! It’s getting worse, I’m going to have to do something about it. How can I best hide it?”
This would go on and on, and every time the nausea subsided a bit I would take a bite to eat... if it didn’t subside I would indeed take a break and tell them I wasn’t well. The problem was I was never well when we ate out, nor when I ate in a group setting elsewhere.
The nausea was just an unpleasant symptom, often caused by certain ingredients my body was reacting to, but SHAME was the real cause. I was ashamed for what I was feeling, for not being normal like everyone else.
Shame was what fired up my vicious anxiety cycle in this case; otherwise, it would have just been nausea. Had I been eating all alone, I would not have felt anxiety, just the nausea.
I’m sure shame is, at least in part, a cause for you too.
Since most people who have followed my coaching over the years never meet me in person, they have a tendency to open up faster, thus helping their recovery. Here are some shame examples of the people I’ve met over the years:
- The woman who was afraid to hold a knife in the kitchen whenever someone else was present, scared of doing something she had seen in horror movies. The mere thought alone was enough to make her anxious. She would think, “I’m crazy, I must be crazy for having ideas like these!” The more she tried to avoid these thoughts, the more they returned, of course.
She was not crazy. Everyone has crazy thoughts. Other people are just better at dismissing them, at not caring. The problem was she was too ashamed to talk about these thoughts. Had she done that, she would have found other people who had had them too.
Nevertheless, she was even too ashamed of herself for having these kinds of ideas.
I’ve met many women and men with this exact same fear who could give the likes of Stephen King a lesson in “coming up with thrilling scenarios.” She was not alone.
- The woman who didn’t want to be left alone with her baby. She always wanted her husband or mother or anyone else present. She didn’t trust herself. This woman believed she would lose her mind or be otherwise unfit to care for her child when left alone.
- The airplane pilot I already talked about who was afraid of flying. Shame was a major cause for him for obvious reasons.
The first step toward his recovery was admitting that he had this ridiculous fear, given his profession. In this case, I was the one he admitted it to, but that was the crucial and necessary step to start his recovery.
- A world famous soccer player who was afraid of getting a panic attack in the middle of the field, with millions of eyes watching his every move. Being a badass soccer player, he was too ashamed to come forward and admit to anyone that this was a fear he had.
- A father who had promised his wife and kids he would finally go on a vacation with them. Weeks before the departure date, his anxiety fiercely increased as he was anticipating getting panic attacks and not being able to return home. He was so afraid to ruin their vacation that he eventually really ruined it by cancelling the entire trip beforehand, using the lame excuse of too much going on at work. He was devastated and felt like a failure.
You may start to see a common thread here. Most of these people believed their fears would not be understood by others. They wouldn’t get it.
At first sight, it seems that shame toward others was at play. Nevertheless, the much deeper lying shame, the shame toward ourselves, is the true cause.
When we, for some reason, can’t own our flaws and mistakes, we’re in fact ashamed of who we are. This has a tremendous impact on our self-worth and on our
true core confidence.
Anxiety breeds on the gap between the image we want others to have of us, and who we know we really are.
The larger that gap, the bigger the anxiety and the stress you will feel, especially in social situations but not limited to those.
If you want to overcome that shame, you need to recognize it. Shame is a simple fear of being unworthy. Unworthy of love and respect from others when you reveal the real you, flaws included.
First of all, as I’m sure you know, we are all perfectly imperfect. And other people really don’t matter as much as we believe they do.
When we show our unique selves to the world, flaws included, and other people freak out, that’s their responsibility, not ours. Here too it will be important to let go, to go with the flow and see what happens.
We’ll discuss every technique you can use in part two and in the addendum, but I already want to share how I dealt with restaurant situations as I was learning and practicing how to overcome my own anxiety and panic attacks.
Badass Ways to End Anxiety & Stop Panic Attacks! Page 5
