The Many Types of Anxiety Explained

Introduction to Video Five

The Calmness in Mind Process to overcome anxiety – Video 5 The Many Types of Anxiety Explained

My name is John Glanvill – Author of the Calmness in mind process for mental health wellness.

Recap of Emotional Energy

In the last video, we explored emotional energy and how, after 6 months or more of stress, trauma, illness and turmoil in your life, your emotional battery becomes discharged.

And when this happens, your unconscious begins to disrupt your life by sabotaging you with unasked for thoughts, feelings, emotions, fears and disruptive behaviours – these, then, mess up your life and cause you to retreat from it by overwhelming or underwhelming your feelings.

This influences you to withdraw from life, work, relationships, social interaction and return home.

Foundations of Anxiety and Depression

In my experience, this is the foundation for over 70% of peoples problems with anxiety and depression. The other 30% is how we were programmed during childhood and post-traumatic stress.

We discussed how our body, the central nervous system, and our subconscious mind are all on one system and that our conscious thinking mind is on a separate arrangement.

Our unconscious mind, which is only as smart as an 8-year-old, thinks like an animal and whose job it is to keep us alive – has just been through 6 months of worry and stress, it had to respond to all our conscious thinking as if what we were saying was true, our battery is flat and it is about to sabotage us to slow us, down, hoping that if we withdraw from life we will have no worries, we will stop thinking and we can biologically recharge.

The Cycle of Worry and Exhaustion

However, we also need to recognise that however hard our unconscious tries to keep us at home so we can silently recharge – consciously we worry more, beat ourselves up and catastrophise about the future and what’s happening to us right now, which just makes it all an exhausting continuous loop!

Using Videos as Meditation

Now, a little tip for you – it may be very beneficial for you to see these videos, not only as a way of learning and reprogramming your unconscious mind, but also as a form of meditation.

A way to dedicate 25 minutes of your day to just sitting quietly, listening to my gentle voice, making the time to find the time, to settle down and recharge your battery.

And during this meditation, you can begin to observe how these subtle subconscious sabotagey voices and thoughts start to sneak in, to try to stop you doing it.

Thoughts like;

”What is he talking about?” ”You are too busy to do this.” ”This video is too long.” ”You know this already.” ”The internet is too slow.” ”Your back hurts.”

If you pay attention and observe, it is powerful to see how sneaky and childlike these thoughts are – it is a great meditation to watch these videos on so many levels.

Understanding Anxiety Strategies

So, lets finally drill down into the strategies open to the subconscious mind, that when implemented, we label as anxiety.

All of these strategies make you feel anxious, which may manifest in any (or more) of the following conditions.

Racing heart Dizziness Trouble breathing Restricted airway Upset stomach Nausea

Racing mind Catastrophizing mind Need to urinate immediately Bloated and gassy Diarrhoea Week legs Aches & Pains Joint immobility Shaking body Headaches Hot, flushed and sweaty

Unfocussed eyes Detachment and disorientation Tight chest Pins and needles in your hands and feet Feelings of dread or impending doom Feelings of rising anger Stumbling words Brain freeze or fogginess

Overview of Anxiety Symptoms

This is not an exhaustive list, but it points to the main symptoms of anxiety and in later videos, I am going to explain these bodily responses in more detail to take away the fear and to teach you what to do to return to calmness quickly.

So, when your subconscious begins to sabotage you – the strategies it has access to, fall into five main categories, of which, you may have any number of, but rarely all of them.

Although you won’t experience all that I talk about in this video, I still think it is good to get a full understanding of how anxiety works in general – so you can also make sense of other peoples seemingly irrational behaviours around you.

Remember anxiety, OCD and depression have become so common that they are nearly the norm – we just don’t tell each other about how we are feeling – many of our friends and loved ones will be having their own battles.

Category 1: Generalised Anxiety

So, the first category we call Generalised Anxiety – this is where you start to feel anxious (or depressed even) but it is almost impossible for you to consciously put your finger on what is actually making you feel anxious.

This is quite clever really, for an 8-year-old strategy – “If I make him feel nervous generally, it makes him start to doubt himself, and the more he can’t figure out what the problems actually are, the more he will continue to doubt himself and doubt the events around him, he will then lose confidence and begin to withdraw from life.”

Very often the anxiety will jump around, so just as you get used to one thing it will jump to another – it’s like a constant feeling of dread or impending doom, but you can’t pinpoint what’s exactly causing these concerns.

It’s a clever way for your unconscious to scare you, this form of generalised anxiety usually happens to people who are very clever and need to know or control everything.

Of course, if they don’t understand what is making them nervous and they can’t control their responses, they feel uncomfortable and retreat from life.

Another group who fall foul of generalised anxiety are nice, shy, quiet individuals (who probably have had some sort of generalised anxiety all their lives) but it gets blown out of proportion after times of stress and it makes them feel a victim to everything, so they will need a partner, friend or parent to help them make decisions and talk them through taking any action in life.

Category 2: Travel Sabotage

The second class of subversion available to your unconscious mind is travel sabotage.

In this class, travelling is used as a way to scare you and keep you at home, it does this by overwhelming your emotions the further you go away from home.

So, for example, you may be able to drive your car locally, but if you go onto a highway or a motorway, you get all panicky.

Or driving over bridges, in tunnels, busy towns. Buses, trains, aeroplanes, going on holiday in general.

Of course, these are a bluff – because if you repeatedly put up with the anxiety, it morphs from one thing to another as it tries to catch your attention – from motorways to tunnels or from multistory carparks to fearing a truck following you.

Also, you may begin to see pattern matches starting to appear – if you don’t like flying, you might not like trains – because, as far as the unconscious mind is concerned they are the same – they are both narrow, noisy, have limited access, take you away from home, and you have no control.

Wrecking going on holiday is a very popular form within this class, even though you know flying is safe and even though you want to go on vacation – all sorts of unasked for fears emerge which make the whole experience too scary, so you cancel it and stay at home – or it spoils your enjoyment (and by conjecture other peoples fun, on the lead up to that break).

Thoughts like, “what if we get burgled whilst away, what if a family member becomes ill whilst we are away, what if I have too many responsibilities; work or family, what if I panic on the aeroplane, what if we get food poisoning? What if we are late for the plane and we lose our money?”

Take a moment to consider all the things that make you anxious, and you will see there are often patterns that emerge, if you are scared of dogs, you will probably be scared of other animals too – it’s just the way our brains work- and on an evolutionary scale makes complete sense.

There is no limit to the 8-year-old strategies that your subconscious can come up with to stop you getting on with life and trying to make you remain at home.

One further note here: If for you, home is, in fact, a dangerous or hostile environment, your subconscious will try to move you to a safer home, perhaps that of a grandparent, a friend or an apartment just for yourself.

Category 3: Social Anxiety

The next class of techniques your little 8-year-old can use to get your attention is based around social anxiety.

This is a smart strategy for your little tired out subconscious mind to use – to grab your attention and keep you at home.

What it does is, start to make you feel uncomfortable around other people, so you go out and socialise less and stay at home more.

Often, this quite confusing because you know going out will be fun, but you catastrophies about what to wear, what to say, where they will go, how you will get home, and the whole event becomes too overwhelming, so you stay at home!

For some, it makes you scared to meet new people, others become anxious around people they know well – your own subconscious mind knows your weaknesses and just plays on them to scare you.

Within this class we can also add places where lots of people gather – so for some people they may get panicky in the supermarket or cinema and the further they are from an exit, or their car, the more the anxiety creeps up on them, or if the queues are long you may feel trapped and unable to quickly retreat.

This social class can also expand to bring in problems with germs, toilets or fearing being ill in public (and although these are a little more OCD like) they do initially start off as anxiety.

Needing to wash your hands before having a coffee or not wanting to touch public door handles – only going to places that have multiple cubicles in the bathroom so there is no chance of getting caught short, fearing that you may vomit in public, therefore, choosing to not go out and eat.

Once again, can you begin to see how all these strategies conspire to make you anxious and uncomfortable in social situations, therefore it is easier to just stay at home and not go out.

Of course, it’s not really more comfortable to stay at home, you are just kidding yourself – because we all need connection with people and, nice days out – it just feels less stressful than the anxiety of going out.

Category 4: Sabotage Anxiety

Class number 4 is sabotage

And this falls into 3 sub-categories, the first being sabotaging work (or if you are younger undermining your education) via making you get all anxious at work, in school or university – once again, with the view to you getting too nervous to be there so you go home – or get fired, so you can be at home and recharge.

Remember your subconscious mind does not care about your job or your education – it cares about your biology and your battery being recharged!

There are many ways this can happen as our subconscious will play upon anything that will get your attention and scare you;

Feeling nervous presenting (even if you are very experienced) Feeling anxious around new people Making you forgetful or clumsy Making you repeatedly late for work

Making you argumentative Making you critical of others Making you need to use the bathroom more often Making you unable to sleep before exams or important meetings Interrupting revision, study or focus during report writing Making you doubt your competency Making your journey to or from work anxiety ridden.

Of course, there may be things specific to you – and if you observe what is happening from the view of an 8-year-old trying to get you back home – they will start to make sense.

Sabotaging Relationships

The second category in this class is sabotaging relationships, this is big and often misunderstood. The subconscious logic of an 8-year-old thinks in terms like this…..

“If I split them up, then I’ll be on my own, i won’t have to worry about anybody else and then I can recharge and recover.”

I know this may sound crazy, however, it is what happens, even if you consciously love that person, your subconscious biology tries to prevail, and the way it sabotages, is through things like making you snappy or explosively angry, or you criticise your partner or keep making derogatory comments, picking at them, belittling them, arguing with them, critiquing their family or friends.

I would really, really, really suggest you pause this video right now and think back to your old relationships (or the one you are in now) and consider the silly things you (or they) did, that when you look back on it, that were stupid, childish or cut nose off to spite face-ish.

Comments and behaviours that put separation and conflict into the relationship rather than connection and intimacy – can you look back on it and see them?

In addition, can you now see that when they said “Why are you so angry?” You couldn’t answer that question, could you? ”Why do you keep criticising me?” You couldn’t answer that question?

”Why don’t you remember what I say?”

You consciously couldn’t answer those questions – NO, because they were “happening” to you, from your subconscious – which knows nothing about marriage or commitment or loyalty – it only knows – unhealthy environment for biological growth or healthy environment for biological growth.

So, it sabotages you with the logic of an 8-year-old, with thoughts and behaviours that worsen the existing relationship – with the view to getting you out of there.

Really think about this…

And to make it worse your conscious mind then jumps to guilt, blame or control to get everything back on track again, which stirs up more inner conflict in your mind, which makes you more emotionally exhausted – and so the cycle continues.

As we get deeper into this course we will be doing a lot of work around relationships, love, communication and understanding how our families and friends are also unknowingly sabotaging themselves too, if they are also going through times of emotional energy exhaustion. It is important to note here that if you have gone through a traumatic event, the person or people closest to you may also have suffered a trauma and you may be covering up emotions to protect them, which leads to further separation or alienation.

Here are a few more techniques that your unconscious mind can use to separate you from your partner:

Low self-esteem, body dysmorphia, not wanting sex, wanting sex all the time, jealousy, indifference, rekindling old relationships, testing the other person’s loyalty, bossiness and control.

Health Sabotage

Now the last group that the subconscious can use to grab your attention is your health – or the health of your loved ones.

And remember, like I said earlier, I am giving you the whole list here, you will have your own specific combination of classes.

This health class falls into 3 categories – the first one being illness, your subconscious can make you more vulnerable to all the colds and flu’s going around – remember it wants you to be off of work! It can increase aches and pains around your body and lower your immune system plus the very act of being anxious is releasing all sorts of negative hormones and peptides into your body that just don’t make you feel comfortable.

It can also, in extreme cases engineer certain conditions (which we may call diseases) to mess up your life and keep you away from work – we know that stress does affect the heart, asthma, diabetes, joints and so on.

Psychosomatic Illness

The second category in the health sabotage class is psychosomatic illness – this is where there is no real provable disease, however, you do have very real symptoms – I will be talking about this in greater detail in the future videos, for now though, let’s list the prime conditions that our subconscious can use to stop us in our tracks, so we will stay at home (and hopefully, silently recharge)

I know what I am about to say, for some, will be highly contentious – but, if you want to profoundly change yourself I would encourage you to keep an open mind and try everything because the stories and concepts you are currently clinging onto are not working are they? Or you wouldn’t be watching this video.

IBS, irritable bowel syndrome, is in fact, a natural condition, a natural response to thinking and worrying too much – in nature if an animal is in danger it evacuates its bowel and bladder immediately, it is supposed to, so it can distract the predator and be lighter to run away – and those same systems are still active within us.

Your little 8-year-old can have a field day controlling you with IBS, it can make you fear travelling, eating out, sitting in silence, what you wear – fear is a great tool to make you stay at home, whilst at the same time all your anxious worrying is making the cycle worse.

Chronic fatigue, ME, Fibromyalgia these are not real diseases – but you do have the symptoms, those are real, they are the bodies reaction to the continued chemical onslaught from your stress, worry and fear – they slow you down, exhaust you, make your joints ache and keep you at home! Where you worry more and the cycle deepens.

Just an observation here; I am yet to meet a person with IBS or Fibromyalgia who is truly easy going or tolerant (they tend to worry about everything) – they find it hard to say no to people, they feel guilty if they don’t help others – they worry what people think of them.

These are patterns of thinking and behaving that you find in certain people, and the effect of these behaviours on their chemical composition leads to these symptoms as the body hijacks them to make them stay at home because the body is so exhausted.

In addition, many of the medications offered to people with chronic fatigue make their minds very foggy so, not only do they fear what is happening to their body, they fear their mind is on the blink too.

Patterns, patterns, patterns, this is why I need to teach you how to think and behave differently to recharge your battery, ease off the sabotage and teach you how to take back control of your emotions.

Other forms of psychosomatic sabotage include migraine headaches, rashes, aches and pains, swollen joints, allergies, blocked sinuses, gut pains, shooting sensations in arms and legs it’s a long list.

Of course, you should get any of these checked out by your physician, however, if they say we can’t find anything wrong with you – it’s probably just your own unconscious trying to get your attention.

Plus you already know that these conditions are self-induced because they clear up a bit when life is going well and flare up when you are tired, stressed or anxious.

Hypochondria

I would also like to add into this group – agoraphobia – which is basically the fear of things that make you fearful in places or situations usually outside of the home, so you can see this is a wonderful way your 8-year-old Keeping you at home – but sadly, worrying about everything, not silently recharging.

The last subcategory in the health section is hypochondria (which I would really classify as OCD, however, we can discuss this later) – It can range from worrying about every last ache and pain right through to a massive fear of death, ill health or pain for yourself or a loved one.

In my experience, this can be crippling and one of the most effective ways the 8-year- old can subconsciously grab your attention and make you stay at home.

Hypochondria seems to only happen to people with very strong characters, who are often quite intelligent and very controlling (although the control may come from a victim perspective).

They need to know what is happening to them in detail, so they google everything or need constant reassurance from a trusted family member or a person of authority like a Doctor.

Even then though, if they don’t get the answer they are looking for they will disregard that advice and research new ways to understand what is happening to them – even though they can’t see that it is a trap and the worry, is in fact, causing all their problems.

Now, if this is you and I am pushing some of your buttons, then good, because unless you can wake up to seeing life differently, this is how you will continue to be, and that is no kind of life!

Broader Perspective on Health

Now I’m not saying there aren’t bugs out there or illness, of course, there are – but many diseases are the symptoms of long periods of stressful or unhealthy living – you don’t catch diabetes, you develop it, you don’t catch cancer you develop it, you don’t catch fibromyalgia you develop it – they are your own biological responses from how you think, behave and respond to life.

Summary of Anxiety Categories

So these are the main 5 ways that anxiety gets our attention, to tell us that we are emotionally exhausted and hijacks us unconsciously to retreat from life by making us scared.

If you pause the video here you can see a diagram I produced, I will also make this available as a free download.

So as we end this video, let me summarise – what I am hoping you are beginning to comprehend is;

Anxiety is a normal condition for certain personality types, it is the battle between our unconscious biology and our conscious thinking mind, who we feel we are and who we think we are – who we feel we are is truer – who we think we are can be changed.

Personifying the Subconscious

Personally, I would encourage you to come up with a nice name for your little 8-year- old – I call mine “pet” – so I consciously think things like “My pet is tired, my pet is sabotaging me, my pet needs some rest, my pet is hungry, my pet doesn’t agree with my conscious decision, my pet is scared, my pet is anxious, my pet has been listening to my thoughts and thinks something dangerous is happening, so it is appropriate he is anxious and has responded this way.”

Knowing this, even if my pet is anxious I can still do things, knowing this I can soothe and calm down my pet, and knowing this I can listen to its real biological needs.

In fact, my pet is more me than my thinking mind or ego, I can live without my ego, identity, thoughts and opinions, but I can’t live without my pet! We will talk a lot more about this in future videos.

Homework and Practical Steps

Finally, your homework.

Take a look at all the things in your life that make you anxious and sort them by the categories I outlined.

Generalised anxiety Travel anxiety Social anxiety Sabotage anxiety Health anxiety

Then look at each fear from the logic of an 8-year-old trying to detach you from outer life and move you back home.

Also, try to see times where your anxiety morphed from one thing to another within a class – like social anxiety morphing from just with strangers to including friends too.

Make a note, look for patterns, write it in your journal.

Can you also start a new dialogue with your subconscious mind and body – your pet? Soothe it, talk softly, placebo it (like I said fib to it) “It’s ok everything is fine, banana, banana, apple, apple – it’s not really listening to the words anyway! Remember to slump or sag your body so the external message to your inner self is “no danger out here” – even if there is!

Looking Ahead to OCD and Depression

Finally, I was hoping to include details about OCD in this video but there wasn’t enough room, so OCD and depression will be covered in the next video.

I know many of you are wondering when we get into to the “how do I stop it phase” please be patient because unless you know what you are dealing with the tendency is to take shortcuts and that’s why anxiety keeps returning for so many people.

Keep rewatching, perhaps make these videos a form of your quiet meditation, a time to recharge or go for a quiet walk and just listen to the video on your headphones.