The fundamentally important six-month anxiety development phase

Introduction to the Session

The Calmness in Mind Process For Anxiety and OCD Recovery

In this session, I will be outlining the lead-up to anxiety and depression, it’s the last piece of the jigsaw you need to comprehend before we really delve deeply into what they are and how to stop them.

Course Approach and Purpose

Remember, this is not your average tutorial, we are starting at the beginning, covering all the bases and creating a new you, in which, anxiety. OCD and depression will struggle to be able to survive. If this were a simple process, everybody would know it and already be free of emotional stress, but, as you know, they are not.

so, let’s not waste any time and dive back into our journey of understanding who and what we are.

Recap of Emotional Impact

In the last video, we discussed how prolonged bouts of stress and anxiety affect our emotions by damping good feelings, numbing bad feelings, then overwhelming us with fear, and for some, leaving us underwhelmed with depression.

And that, this emotional turmoil interrupted our ability to make decisions and often led us to vice land where we ate, drank, shopped (or whatever) to try and get some form of emotional hit, even if it was destructive.

Of course, I’m being very generic here, and you need to take from this what is appropriate for you and your circumstances.

However, like I keep saying, look for the patterns, and you will see that emotional health issues, for 90% of people, follow the same routines.

Key Takeaways from Previous Video

In the last video, I also showed you how your body responded to your internal thoughts, external tonality and physical bodily responses as if they were real – so I could prove to you that:

A. You can’t think your way out of anxiety
B. Your conscious words weren’t being listened to by your sub-conscious – only your tonality

C. All day long you are unknowingly stressing your body and flooding yourself with stress chemicals that continuously turn on your sympathetic nervous system, exhaust you biologically, depress the immune system and uncalibrate your emotions.

The Onset of Emotional Conditions

And from this point of emotional exhaustion is where we are going to enter the story of anxiety from.

Nobody is born with anxiety or OCD or depression – you can’t catch them, they are not diseases, there was a time when you didn’t have them and then a time when you did.

Many people get over them, I did, therefore if they just come on – and if many people have recovered – then why not you?

Perhaps you learned it, maybe life’s situations conditioned you into it, and probably how you have been thinking, worrying and behaving during this phase of emotional turmoil has changed your internal biological chemistry – which translates into how you currently feel!

Introducing the 6-Month Anxiety Development Phase

We are going to explore all of these, for now though, let me introduce you to an important thing you need to know about anxiety, and I call it the 6-month anxiety development phase.

So, there was a time before you had anxiety (assuming you just didn’t learn it from your parents – and if you did learn it, well, you can unlearn it.)

So, there was this time before you had anxiety, for some of you that may have been 25 years ago, for some just a couple of years ago and for others, perhaps, your anxiety only started 3 months ago.

It doesn’t matter, but your anxiety did “begin” – perhaps suddenly, perhaps it gradually crept up on you? Perhaps following some trauma, loss, grief, rejection, abuse, life event – it doesn’t really matter what caused it – the point is it did start!

Misconceptions About Anxiety Triggers

Often, wherever the anxiety started or what you were doing during your first panic attack or emotional overwhelm becomes your concept of what makes you anxious….

Was it while you were driving or giving a presentation, on a bus, in a shop, in a hospital or abroad on holiday?

Where I am taking you to is – yes, that is where it happened and yes, that is what you were doing – but these activities are not necessarily the cause of your anxiety, they were just the environment – or just the situation you were in – when your anxiety first kicked off.

So much of OCD is spun around this perspective, however, more about this later.

The Real Cause of Anxiety

What I want to explain to you next is the real reason why your anxiety got started – and to show you that where it started and how it started are not the cause – they are the symptom!

Now, remember, the way I work is to be scientific, in-depth and only talk about things that I have experienced – I then take all my knowledge and convert that data into stories and metaphors that are understandable and give the listener structure to see what is happening to them and concepts that can be used for their recovery.

Energy and Emotional Health

In our world, everything is driven by energy – including us. You might say that depression is a lack of energy, anxiety is the misuse of energy and OCD is the overuse of energy on a subject that traps you rather that frees you – imagine if you spent as much time painting, writing, working, building relationships etc. as you did catastrophising about whether the door is locked?

Physical vs. Emotional Energy

If we stay on the subject of energy and apply it to ourselves, within our bodies, we have two quite unique systems that use very different energy systems, the first system I am going to call our physical energy, it’s the amount of energy required within us, so we can move around – lift things, get things done, exercise etc.

It is very much geared towards our muscle and skeletal systems – at the end of a busy day where we experienced lots of movement and exercise we might say “My body is fatigued” or “I am exhausted.”

We then go to sleep, and when we get up the next morning, our body has recharged itself, and we have enough energy for another day, it works really well.

Understanding Emotional Energy

The other system we have, I am going to call Emotional Energy, its what I have been talking about in the previous videos – it is our autonomic nervous system, it is our decision-making system, our feelings, emotions, the fight or flight system, our biology, our immune system, the chemical soup our cells operate from within.

This is what I call our Emotional Energy, and it is very different from our Physical Energy.

It works in a completely different way – we may get to the end of a day and say “I am drained, I am wiped out, I’m exhausted” we then go to bed, rest, sleep.

And in the morning our Physical Energy has recharged, we can get up and walk around, but our Emotional Energy hasn’t and we awaken either feeling Numb “Pff what’s the point”, or we are already anxious about the day ahead.

Therefore, it seems that sleep doesn’t recharge Emotional Energy (at least not sleep by itself).

Chemical Imbalance and Depression

Put basically our Physical muscles can rest overnight and recharge by drawing energy from the calories we consume.

In later videos, we will go into more detail about this, especially as we learn more about depression – which is partly a chemical imbalance – and if it is a chemical imbalance we need to change our existing cells and the current chemical soup they live in – so they create new chemicals – – to give us new moods – which change how we feel.

And that may take a few months of tricking our old cells into behaving differently, even if we don’t feel like it because we are currently depressed!

Patterns of Emotional Exhaustion

Once again, can you begin to see the patterns of what we are dealing with here? And of course, I am going to teach you how to do this later in the class, when the time is right.

But for now, let’s see our emotional energy as the current state of our internal chemistry, the efficiency of our immune system at this moment, the current levels of stress hormones within us and the overall energy balance of our system, based on our emotional stress during the preceding six months of our life.

The 6-Month Threshold

Anxiety or depression (depending on your personality type) are the natural conditions that arise following a prolonged and sustained period of emotional stress -and for most people, it is 6 to 8 months.

Take a look at your own life, think back to when your anxiety or depression began and explore what happened in the 6 – 8 month period leading up to your problem really taking hold.

And remember you may have had anxiety for 15 years, so what happened in the 6 months before then?

Relationship issues, job worries, being bullied, family stresses, moving house or school, illness, the death of a loved one, the passing of a pet – or (for some people who worry a lot) just a prolonged worrisome period of life.

Also, simple things that we often overlook, like – just being a very busy parent, a harried business person or a diligent student – can, over the course of 6 months or so, deplete, run down and chemically alter our Emotional Energy.

Biological Response to Stress

It is almost as if we humans can naturally handle about 6 months of emotional stress before we become emotionally ill – emotionally exhausted – and we call the manifestation of that exhaustion depression or anxiety – as our body starts to unconsciously shut down and begins to sabotage us into staying at home.

It kind of makes sense really – 6 months is about 2 seasons, it must have been very hard for our animal caveman predecessors to make it through autumn and winter – so they needed to be able to hold an internal buffer of emotional energy to get them through the cold, the famine, the darkness, until the spring came and life would be less harsh – and they could recharge again for 6 months, until the cycle repeated.

So naturally, a normal human can handle about 6 months of crap in their life and manage, but – if that crap exceeds 6 months or they were already quite rundown when it started, or if they tend worry more than others, the body exceeds a biological threshold and unconsciously the animal within us will interrupt our logical conscious thinking and begin to sabotage us to slow us down, keep us at home, shy us away from life – as a mechanism to keep safe and recharge.

The Emotional Energy Battery Metaphor

And remember our subconscious is only as clever as an 8-year-old, it is an animal and doesn’t use too much logic or reason, it just wants you to be alive, it doesn’t care about your job, partner, car, friends, it will just want to unconsciously sabotage you and trick you into staying at home – hoping that you will do nothing and just recharge!

So, because our unconscious mind loves (and works with stories) lets put this into a metaphor we can use to understand and apply to anxiety.

I like to imagine that my central nervous system, my body and my subconscious mind are all on one system and that system is battery powered – it has the capacity to hold a charge or a buffer of spare emotional energy that could be used during times of stress, worry, injury, conflict or loss.

When times are good (and our thoughts are quiet, worries are limited) it is gently recharging itself – and during times of stress we can draw down on that energy – we hear people say all the time “I don’t know how I coped, but I did, I don’t know where I got that energy from…”

It’s a very cool biological tool – and the way it recharges itself is through silence, not thinking, not worrying, not catastrophising – remember our body listens to our thoughts, thinks they are true and responds biologically – if we are silent, our biology loves it and we recharge.

I like to imagine this as an actual battery stored in my chest and at any moment I am aware of the charge it is holding – is it full ie 6 months of reserves ready for me to use or has it been depleted and needs for me to pay attention to recharging it by sorting things out in my life, worrying less and meditating more?

Emergency Energy Reserve

This battery, which holds a 6-month charge of reserve emotional energy also has a small section of energy that is reserved for emergencies.

In times of immediate danger we are just flooded with energy and pain-reducing chemicals, it’s just a natural procedure that has evolved within us.

In many potentially dangerous accidents in my own life, car crashes, skiing incidents, falling from ladders, falling through the frozen ice of a lake – in the second or two before the impact – always the same 3 things happened.

Firstly, time slowed down, I had time to think about what I needed to do to minimise the negative potential of what might happen.

This happens because the subconscious brain turns off the conscious logical thinking mind – firstly it is the part of the brain that is furthest from your CNS so the signal takes a long time to get to your body and secondly, …..words take too long to process “shall I do this or shall I do that?” Plus the conscious mind works thousands of times slower than the unconscious mind – so, in times of danger, it is a liability.

Secondly, I wasn’t scared, I didn’t like what was happening, but I just accepted it and did what could be done at that moment – once again, with the conscious mind turned off – fear, which is a conscious perspective was reduced.

And, thirdly my body was flooded with all sorts of chemicals that reduced my pain, enhanced my reactions and gave me more strength to react. It also blacked me out before the moment of impact and if I had of died at that moment I wouldn’t have even known!

So, a small part of the battery holds a charge ready for emergencies and, mostly, this charge is ring-fenced and only accessible during times of emergency and this is a wonderful thing.

How the Battery Works in a Calm Person

The way the battery works within a person who is calm and “fully charged” is like this….

We consciously think “oh, this is nice” and our unconscious agrees, yes, “this is nice, and we have a whole lot of spare Emotional Energy in our battery – let’s use some of that to tell the body – yes, go ahead and do that thing.”

The energy and chemicals released flood our organs and give us a good feeling, which we act upon.

At the same time if the conscious mind says “I don’t like this” the unconscious mind agrees and it uses the spare energy to release into us, it agitates our organs with the feeling of discomfort so we stop what we are doing or change the situation we are in.

Good things feel good so we do them, bad things feel bad so we move away, say no or change our situation if we can.

When the Battery is Flat

However, when an individuals battery becomes empty or run down after 6 months of worry, stress or illness, things are different – a good thing happens and the conscious mind says “this is good” and the unconscious mind says “yes, that is good but our battery is flat and we need to save the emergency energy for real emergencies, so I can’t give you a good feeling.

So, although the person is in a good situation, it doesn’t necessarily feel good.

When he is in a bad situation (which is not life-threatening) the conscious mind says “I don’t like this” – the unconscious says “I don’t like this either, however, there is not enough free energy to tell the body” – so the person just looks at the problem and feels numb “We’ll what can I do?”

So numbness, non-decision and procrastination prevail.

Therefore, can see that if a person can recharge their battery life feels better and the motivation to get things done increases?

Subconscious Sabotage When Exhausted

As we expand our 6-month anxiety development story a little further we need to explore what happens to our subconscious mind when the battery has become flat through too much thinking, worrying, stress and fear.

Once the battery is flat our subconscious mind, which as we described in earlier videos is more of an animal than a human and has only the logical intelligence of an 8-year-old in the complexity of the strategies it runs to keep us alive – begins to freak out.

If it could talk but it cant – It would say – “I am your unconscious mind, it’s my job to keep you alive, I give you emotions (unconscious decisions) to move you towards good things and away from bad stuff through agitating your organs with my emotional energy.

Because your emotional energy battery is flat I don’t have the energy to do this, and it is freaking me out – how can I keep you alive if I can’t communicate with you?

Of course, this is a metaphor I am using here, but I promise you that we are pointing to the truth.

So, as your subconscious mind and central nervous system get all exhausted, and all uncalibrated self-preservation and self-survival begin to kick in, and they begin to sabotage you.

This is done by subconsciously hijacking you through, anxiety, OCD, illness or depression to scare you to withdraw from life, work and relationships and force you to stay at home.

This is all done subconsciously of course, and with the logic of a young child, consciously you think “why am I doing this, this is silly.” Yet, subconsciously it is saying “excellent, if I make him anxious at work, he will leave his job and stay at home, where we can recharge and emotionally get back under control.

The Anxiety and OCD Cycle

So, you either give in to the anxiety and stay at home – where, rather than stopping thinking and recharging your battery, you worry even more.

Or you ignore the anxiety and plough on through life – where the subconscious will then need to be even more sneaky (and childlike) in the new ways it will use to make you stay at home or get back to home when you are out -this is the beginning of OCD.

So, this is the 6 month anxiety or depression development phase it is where you are getting run down and exhausted from the events of your life, during this time you don’t necessarily have anxiety or depression – but once the battery is flat they come on, even if the events of life have rectified themselves.

That confuses a lot of people – they say there is nothing wrong with my life, so why has this condition come on? Yet, they forget what happened in the year before.

Understanding the Patterns

I hope this is making sense, and you can look back through your life and see the patterns of how mental illness generally follows bouts of stress and then subconsciously conspires to keep you at home.

Homework and Next Steps

In the next video, I will be explaining how this sabotage works and how it relates to anxiety, OCD and depression.

So your homework:

As I keep saying, we are reprogramming your subconscious mind, just because you understand something consciously does not mean that it has registered subconsciously yet – keep rewatching the videos.

Take a look back through your life and start exploring what was happening 6 months before your anxiety or depression began to look for patterns that explain it coming on.

Begin to understand that where and when your anxiety came on does not necessarily mean it caused it – like I said – just because your panic attack happened at work and made you afraid of work – does not mean that work is the problem – maybe it was just what your subconscious mind used to sabotage you to stay at home because your battery was flat.

The logic of an 8-year-old, if I make her anxious at work, they will fire her, she can then stay at home and recharge.

Consciously you are thinking OMG where will get money from and subconsciously she is thinking – excellent, keeping her away from work will allow her to recharge and be safe……..

These are the juxtapositions that you need to observe and understand if you are going to break the cycles of anxiety.

Keep in mind that your body responds to your thoughts regardless of their truth, and remember we are starting to talk softly and gently to our body to soothe it – we are relaxing and slumping our body to trick it into thinking nothing wrong is happening out there.

And, I hope you have started to journal so you can make notes about these videos and begin to see your own patterns, and, perhaps, you are beginning to get little breakthroughs? Write them down, keep a record, these will be really useful in times ahead.

Encouragement to Subscribe

Thank you for watching, keep revisiting the videos, and if this is making sense, please encourage others to sign up here at Patreon which will help us all.

I will see you in the next video where you are finally going to get a lot of the answers you have been waiting for about anxiety and OCD.