Anxiety is actually a choice

Anxiety is not real. I know. I'm a therapist and a spiritual teacher. How could I say that?

After years of practice, I found that anxiety is mostly a product of resisting our primary emotions. Meaning, if we have social anxiety, then we're afraid of failure or social rejection. We then become scared of that, and then we avoid our memories of social rejection and abandonment from early childhood. And then we choose to avoid that by being anxious.

So anxiety is actually a choice in that we're choosing the experience of anxiety over a greater fear, which is the fear of failure. So the key to working with your anxiety is not to find a way to regulate it or mitigate it, but rather recognize the anxiety is there and then be willing to ask the hard question, what's beneath my anxiety? Go beneath it and encounter your fear of social rejection, fear of abandonment, fear of disappointment. Sit with that fear, and when you come back to the present situation that causes you anxiety, it will be significantly less.

Hi, I'm Scott, a spiritual teacher guiding people through spiritual awakening by embracing our humanness.