005 Overcome Anxiety: End It Once and For All

Welcome to a Changed Mind a journey into the topics that matter to you most, from the neuroscience and spirituality of mindset and personal growth to groundbreaking strategies for health, wealth and relationships, to open and honest conversations about pressing global issues such as the environment, censorship, corporate capture and democracy.

Each and every episode reminds us of the certainty of the goodness of the future and provides the teachings, tools and timeless wisdom inspiring you to create real, lasting change in your life and in the world. If you've been desiring a sanctuary for your spirit, a place to go to tune out the distraction, negativity and doom and gloom, so that you can tap into the deep power, the vibrancy and the potential you have inside, you're in the right place. Welcome to a Changed Mind. Hey, it's David.

Welcome to another episode of a Changed Mind podcast. A sanctuary for your human spirit, a place where I will remind you each and every day of the certainty of the goodness of the future and man. I am so excited for this episode to share with you something that transformed my life, from my own personal experience, that I know so many people are struggling with in the world.

Because once we transform this, we unlock so much personal power, so much more clarity, so much more capability and capacity in our life. And the topic we're going to be talking about today is anxiety. Before we get into that, whether you're a first time listener, whether you're a repeat listener of the show, do me a favor If you love this episode, if you love the show, do not forget to give us a review on whatever platform you're listening to.

This is the way that we can expose this great work to so many other people, so that you and I, together, can make an impact on others' lives and so that we can come together and attract even more amazing, awakened, impact-driven and conscious individuals into this incredible community that we are creating together. So I'm excited about diving deep into this topic of overcoming anxiety. I think there's a lot of conversation out there.

You can go on YouTube, you can search on the podcast platforms, you can find a lot of different conversations and opinions and suggestions Very well meaning on how to overcome anxiety, how to deal with feelings of anxiety or panic attacks or stress or fear, and there are some good suggestions out there but they don't really get to the root of the problem because we don't understand actually the root of where anxiety comes from.

And I'm going to be diving deeper on this topic than probably you've ever heard before and I'm excited to be able to share this with you. And it comes out of my own journey of anxiety. I started having anxiety and panic attacks at the age of 17 years old. I actually had a very rare health situation. It wasn't serious but it was complex and as a result of trying to find a solution for it, I went from doctor to doctor to doctor. My parents took me to different specialists.

I had a lot of different tests that were done. I missed about half my senior year of high school and, for whatever reason that catalyzed anxiety for me, I started having panic attacks. I remember the very first time I was training because I was going to be playing collegiate basketball.

So my senior year of high school I was training with a well-known strength trainer and athletic development coach about a half hour from my home in Orange County, california, and I was coming back from a training session and there's a place in the Irvine El Toro area called the California the Y. It's where the 405 and the five highway meet and it's like I mean gosh, this was like 20 years ago. It was a 22 lane exchange where these two major highways come together.

Despite the fact that there were so many lanes at this interchange, there was just always a ton of traffic, and so you'd sit there for 30 minutes just trying to get through what was called the El Toro Y and I was stuck in traffic and I had this overwhelming feeling of fear and panic. It didn't make any intellectual sense. It was really just this feeling that I was going to die, that I wasn't safe, that I wasn't going to be okay. I felt the sensations in my body.

It was like my heart rate increased All of a sudden. I was just very sensitive to tingling and my fingers and my extremities, and everybody experiences anxiety in a different way, but that was the first time I had a full blown panic attack and what ended up happening was I started becoming afraid of my anxiety, my panic attacks. My panic attacks increased.

So I ended up going and seeing a therapist it was actually my mom's therapist at the time and they said hey, you know, what we recommend is that you take medication for your anxiety. And so at that time I was put on a medication called Prozac and then eventually I was put on a medication called Paxil and eventually I was put on another medication called Afexer and I was basically on medication for about almost 15 to 20 years of my life.

It wasn't until I was 33 years old and if you've heard my story from episode four where Carol and I shared our story, it was a point in my life where I realized I was a drug addict, I was an alcoholic, I was a pornography addict, I was a workaholic, I was just a very obsessive compulsive in my behaviors and I started working a 12 step program and after I had about six months in the 12 step program and working the 12 steps and working with my sponsor and going to meetings and meeting every week with other fellows in that fellowship men and women and I started developing some recovery, I made a decision that I wanted to get off of the medications that I was on for my anxiety.

This wasn't really a logical decision. You know, at that point in time I didn't have a perspective that it would be better to be off of medication than on medication. I wasn't as deep into the awareness I have today of the body's incredible capacity to heal when left uninterfered with.

I wasn't into like the organic food conversation or being aware of environmental toxicities, or I wasn't even aware of some of the things that had already happened with pharmaceutical companies promoting products that they knew were bad for people and all of the litigation and eventually all of the compensation that pharmaceutical companies had to pay. So my point is I just had this intuitive hit that I should probably get off of anti-anxiety medications, and when I did, it was very difficult.

I had a lot of withdrawal symptoms from the medication that at that time my doctor had not made me aware of, because I think they didn't even know at that time that there were these types of withdrawal symptoms. The idea was, hey, you get on the medication and it supposedly helps with your anxiety, so just stay on it forever. But once I got through the withdrawal symptoms, one of the things I experienced was what I would call a complete reactivation of my nervous system.

I wasn't aware at how neurologically suppressive the medication was and how it had numbed my emotions, and so that's one way that I think it supported my anxiety and my panic attacks was I just wasn't able to feel as much as I was feeling before, and again, I'm not suggesting that it was necessarily because of the medication. I'm just sharing that this was my experience.

And then when I got off of anti-anxiety SSRI prescription drugs, all of a sudden it was like a full frontal attack with the emotions of life, and I learned how to work through those emotions the fears, the overwhelm, the sadness, the anger and a lot of.

That was what gave birth to the tools, the distinctions and the frameworks that I teach today to help people work with their emotions and work with the experiences of life and be able to transform those things that historically cause a stress or anxiety and allow them to work their way through our nervous system and metabolize them, because that's what actually gives us greater emotional capacity and range in our nervous system and allows us to have a powerful living experience.

And so the conversation that we're gonna have today is going deep into an understanding of what anxiety is.

Maybe you're experiencing anxiety or panic attacks, maybe you're just experiencing more stress than you'd like to experience in your life, but it's very important that you have a deep, fundamental understanding of what anxiety is, because anxiety can feel crippling and, as a result of that, we want it to go away, we want it to stop, but there's really nowhere to go because we can't get outside of our own bodies.

And so I wanna start out by sharing with you what I've come to understand and the truth that anxiety is actually the body's process, one of the body's many processes of healing. It's what anxiety is. So it's important to first understand, and then I'm gonna give you some really practical tools. But this understanding is really really important. In it. It's not talked about anywhere else. Anxiety is a healing process.

What has happened over time is that, as you've been experiencing the different experiences of your life frustration, anger, stress, overwhelm, feeling like there's not enough time, feeling like you're not good enough, feeling like you're not as far along as you should be All of those dissonant thoughts right, they're not resonant thoughts, they're not joyful thoughts those dissonant thoughts and the emotions that you experience with them. Right?

We break all emotions into two categories powerful states of emotion emotions that feel good and primal states of emotion emotions that don't feel good and you're always in one state of being or another. You're always in a powerful state or a primal state and you're not in two states at once, and that really maps to the way your nervous system works. Powerful states are the parasympathetic nervous system rest, relaxation and your personal power.

Primal states are the sympathetic expression of the nervous system fight or flight and the only thing that's causing us these emotions are our thoughts or the meanings that we give the experiences of our life. It's not the experience itself.

And so, as you're out there experiencing life, a lot of your old limiting beliefs from your childhood are coming up and they're shaping the lens of your experience, and oftentimes they're limited or we would call them, they're unintelligent, and they begin to invoke within you these primal states and your body accumulates that energy.

Over time, it accumulates that dissonant energy or tension or stress on your system and so, over time, as you can no longer, or your body can no longer, contain the amount of dissonant energy that you've accumulated, based on years and years and years and years of a variety of thoughts that have invoked these emotions, it produces anxiety as a way to start letting tension off the system.

And we can see, for example, that when animals have a confrontation, a stressful confrontation, when they move into a primal state, after that confrontation they'll move their body, they'll shake their wings, they'll shake their bodies, they'll go for a run, they'll roll in the ground. They have a way of offloading this dissonance and tension. But we've lost connection with that primal instinct of alleviating ourselves of stress.

And so there's this accumulation over time, right, we become emotionally constipated with all of these energies in our body and in our nervous system and in our cells. So the body, in its infinite wisdom, is always working to restore homeostasis.

I believe the body has the capacity to heal anything that it experiences. I like what bj Palmer, the founder of chiropractic, said, which is nature needs no help, just no interference. And if you look at the chiropractic sciences, it's really around this idea of hey, if we can just realign the body and restore it to its original alignment, the body will heal. So what happens is that we begin to experience anxiety, but we experience it as if it's a foreign invader.

We experience it as if it's a problem. We don't experience it as if it is healing Right, as if it is a symptomatology that is indicating the restoration of homeostasis in the body. So the metaphor I would give is when we have a fever, right, most people understand, and medical practitioners would agree, that the fever is a helpful mechanism.

When there's some sort of viral infection in the immune system needs to be activated, the body increases its temperature, which then creates a cascade of other immunological responses so that your bodies can respond to whatever the I wouldn't call it the foreign invader is, but to whatever is going on in the body, whether it's a bacterial, viral, some other sort of Infection, and we allow the fever to run its course, like in oftentimes, we're waiting and wanting the fever to break, because then it's an indication that now the body systems have become activated for the healing process to be initiated.

Well, I want you to encourage you to think about. Anxiety is the same thing. Anxiety is the breaking of a fever, it's the activation of a response in the body to this accumulation, this constipation of unmetabolized emotions that is now essentially the equivalent of you know, when you see the two geese who fight and then shake afterwards. This is, this is your shaking process, and so, while the anxiety isn't comfortable, we want to allow it.

The problem that occurs with anxiety is the meaning we give the experience of anxiety, or the healing process. In other words, the body has this natural healing process called anxiety, which is meant to offload the distance that you've accumulated over time Based on your misinterpretations of the experiences that you've had, in viewing your life through the lens of your limiting beliefs, which move you into a parasympathetic, fight or flight state.

Then we experience anxiety and rather than going, oh well, this is great. Right, this is my body's way of relieving me of all of that tension that I've accumulated over time, so that that tension doesn't further accumulate Into inflammatory disease, neurological disease, autoimmune disease, cancers and so on and so forth. Right, my body's catching this early and releasing this energy through this feeling. That's not particularly comfortable, same as a fever, right, which is anxiety.

A fever is not comfortable either, but what happens is the mind. We then give the experience of the anxiety a meaning, and so I want you to think about this is you've experienced anxiety? What is? What are the thoughts that occur for you? What's the meaning that you give that experience? So most people have a meaning that they give it of like there's something wrong with me. Oh, my god, there's something wrong with my body. What's going on? Why is this happening?

What if I die right or even after we've had anxiety or panic attacks on multiple occasions? What if this time it's actually something serious? What if it doesn't go away? How do I make it stop? How do I get away from it? And the resistance just increases the tension.

So, in other words, here your body is trying to alleviate you of tension, and in the process of alleviation, the meaning that you're giving the experience because it feels physically uncomfortable there's no denying of that the meaning that you're giving the experience is yet more fight or flight and more misinterpretation and more dissonance.

And so not only do we not allow the release of the tension that is already in our body through the process of what we call anxiety or panic attack, but now we create even more tension on the system and it ends up just looping and looping, and looping and looping. My grandfather had this little toy that used to sit on his table and I would grab.

It was called the Chinese finger trap and it was made of straw and you put one finger in on the left side of this straw tube and then you put the right finger in on the right side of the straw tube and as a kid, I pull my fingers to try to get my fingers out. But what would actually happen is this little straw contraption would just tighten down around my left and right finger, and the more I pulled, the tighter it got.

And so the way that we experience anxiety today is very much like a Chinese finger trap. Number one, because we don't understand what anxiety is, which, again, is a healing process that, if allowed, will alleviate your system of the tension that you have accumulated Over time. The mistake that we make is that we think the anxiety is some foreign invader. We think there's something wrong with us.

Nobody's ever taught us, and doctors don't explain to us, that anxiety is actually the same thing as a fever. It's an indication of a healing that's taking place, and the key is to know what's going on right. Which is this and this distinction I learned when carol and I were in Costa Rica doing indigenous medicine healing work, specifically with ayahuasca and the shaman who facilitated this medicine.

Experience has become a very good friend of ours, meetrapoliti, who has a wonderful book that I recommend that you check out on amazon, with his poems around healing and these misinterpretations and how we can understand that, in fact, in every moment of our experience, life is working for us, our bodies working for us, everything is working for our growth are healing and our prosperity, even though it may be Uncomfortable.

Mitra, after the medicine ceremony in the morning, explain the discomfort that we were experiencing in ceremony the night before the hallucinations, the physical discomforts, the emotional discomforts was actually all of the dissonance leaving our body. That's what the healing is, and he gave me a very powerful mantra, which is what's coming is going. What I'm experiencing right now isn't invading me, it's not coming into my body.

It's actually been inside of me and it's now coming up to the surface to be released. What's coming is going. The key is to understand this, that what's happening as a healing, and we simply need to allow it. And so that's step one. You know what do we do. We need to know what's going on, because if you understand what's going on, that'll put you in an intellectual position to allow the experience rather than resist the experience.

It will prevent the unintelligent thinking, the meanings that you give this experience of anxiety, that it's never gonna go away, that there's something wrong with you, that you're gonna die. You won't do that, because you'll understand that it's a healing, that what's coming is going, even though it's uncomfortable. The key is to allow it, and I'm gonna share with you what you can do through the discomfort. But that's really step one.

Step one is prevent the perpetuation of dissonance on your nervous system, which occurs when you move into fear of the anxiety. You move into fear of the anxiety, the anxiety can't be released and you just compound the situation because you're putting more stress on your system Simply as a result of the unintelligent meaning, the misunderstanding, the limiting belief you have around the anxiety experience. So now we need to start to look at well, what do we do while we are uncomfortable?

What do we do now, knowing that the body would never hurt us, that a healing is taking place, that life will never hurt you, that everything you experience in your life is love, is healing, including anxiety? What do we now do in order to facilitate ourselves through this uncomfortable experience? And the answer is that we take this understanding and then we do activities that allow us to support the reestablishment of our resonance. Right, because what's happening is you're energetically off.

So, number one and I think, the most helpful thing to do when you are in anxiety which again just simply means that there's too much dissonant energy on your system is go, connect with the resonant energy, and you can go out and do that by simply walking on the earth. Go out in nature. If you don't live in nature, find a park, put your feet on the ground, connect to the resonance of the earth. The earth has a vibration that is a pure resonant vibration or an ohm vibration.

It is a vibration of healing, it's a vibration of homeostasis, and so what you wanna do is you wanna be able to support the release of the dissonant energy by connecting with the resonance. Literally, as you put your feet on the ground, you're feeding that dissonant energy that's also coming out through the symptomatology of anxiety back into the earth.

Right, you're releasing this frenetic electrical energy and you're bringing electrons, vibration and resonance from the groundedness of the earth into your system. That's the first thing that you can do Go out into nature, ground and connect. You can also ground and connect in a variety of other ways. See, anxiety tends to isolate us, it separates us from other people, it separates us from joyful experiences, and so I don't know what connection looks like for you.

It might be going to church or temple or your mosque. It might be doing some volunteer work that you stop doing because of your anxiety and your panic attacks. It might be having dinner with friends.

Think about what life was like before the anxiety and the things that you were doing to connect with yourself and connect with others, and begin a practice of integrating those things again, because now you will be in the practice of being the person that you were before the anxiety began to take hold of you. Right?

A lot of this is if you wanna be a person who's not suffering with anxiety, then do the things that a person who doesn't suffer from anxiety would be doing, and so we start to get into these practices Again. What are we talking about? Number one allow the anxiety. That's a healing that's taking place. Number two support the reestablishment of resonance and the removal of dissonance in your body. Go out and ground on the planet. Go out and connect with other people.

Be the person who doesn't allow their lives to be limited by anxiety, by doing the things that that person would do. That will also allow you to recalibrate the energy of your body. Be aware of what you're putting into your body, right? So think about what foods you're putting into your body. Don't put in ultra processed foods, because that's dissonant energy. Try to eat healthy, organic foods. Try to eat some grass-fed beef or animals without hormones, or organic plants or fruits.

Stay away from electronics, right, don't look at electronics before you go to bed. Check your screen time and reduce it on your phone. All of that is electrical vibration and energy that is dissonant or different from the natural resonance of who we are. Stay away from electromagnetic frequencies. Remove yourself from toxins.

These are all things that you can do to support your body's detoxification process as it is releasing all of the accumulated limiting beliefs and misunderstanding and anxieties and stressors that you have become constipated energetically with overtime. Right, know that this is a gift. Remind yourself as it's happening that it is a gift, because it is a gift as you transform this energy in your body, as you learn to release it as you've experienced it, and then let it go.

It will transform into expansion. It will transform your nervous system. It will increase your range and capacity. You will be someone who has tasted and overcome anxiety. Every challenge is meant for us to work through to experience, to process and to let go and, as you do this, that energy that moves through your system and through your body will become your personal power. It will translate into deeper connection. It will translate into clarity. It will translate into purpose.

It will translate into wealth. It will translate into your ability to influence and lead others. Your anxiety is a gift, just like my drug and alcohol addiction was a gift. Just like the challenges that I've had in my business are gifts. Just like the challenges I had in the family that I grew up with are gifts. Just like the challenges that I have in my relationship with Carol are gifts. We don't want a life that is challenge-less.

We want to have the wisdom and the tools to be able to work through these challenges so that we can digest them and translate them through our nervous system into the resonant version of what they are meant to be, which is our personal power. I remember about a year ago when I was going through a very, very difficult time, a lot of different stressors in my life. I was sitting in my car crying and I said to God. I said, god, just make my life easier.

I paused because I realized that that didn't feel right to me. I stopped and I reimagined my request to God. I said God, make me stronger so that I can handle all of the challenges that you give me that are meant to make me stronger and make me wiser and make me more loving, make me richer and make me more compassionate, because I don't know anybody who's achieved an extraordinary life without having to overcome some challenge.

Your challenge right now is showing up in the form of anxiety. I want you to know that if you're here, it's because you're on the brink of learning how to transform this anxiety into your personal power by number one, understanding what anxiety is. It's your body's way of loving you into a healing. So, as best as you can, even though it's uncomfortable, allow it. If doing some deep breathing supports it, fantastic.

If you find some other tool or modality, like EFT or tapping or whatever else anybody else is talking about out there about how to alleviate anxiety, use those tools to support you through it. But, most importantly, know that what's happening is a great healing and expansion is taking place within you, and allow it.

Disallow the fear that something is going wrong, that you're going to end up having this for the rest of your life, that there's something that's invading you or attacking you, because none of that is true. Be with the anxiety and then support the process of your own personal reorganization. Realize that there are things that you can do, from connecting to the earth to connecting with other people, to being conscious of putting resonance in your body.

Listen to uplifting music rather than getting caught up in the news and the divide. Tune in to another one of my podcast episodes, if this feels good, and allow that resonance to come in through your ears and to feed your system and feed your soul. This is the practice, and this is the beginning of a practice not just for your anxiety. It's a practice to live each and every day in your life. This is the practice that I'm committed to.

This is the practice that is a community we're all working on a daily basis, because if it's not anxiety, it's a business challenge. If it's not a business challenge, it's a relationship challenge. If it's not a relationship challenge, it's another health challenge.

If it's not a health challenge, it's a pandemic, or it's a recession, or it's something else that's going on in the world that we cannot avoid, but that we can experience from a powerful state of being, that we can experience with a changed mind, and when we do, we're able to translate that experience into something that allows us to become even more powerful, and it truly is the gift that becomes the way for us to create the vision that we have for our lives.

So you're in the right place right now. You're in the right conversation. See if you can find some gratitude for your anxiety.

See if you can be thankful for the fact that your system works this way, and see if you can appreciate and anticipate that, as you interact with your anxiety from a higher level perspective, from this intelligent way, appreciate that as it translates through your system, you're going to learn something really, really powerful from this that you're going to be able to leverage into creating everything that you want for your life. This anxiety is not going to hold you back.

It's going to propel you forward. You're going to know that from personal experience and I'm here with you to support you through the process. So, baby steps right, one day at a time. You're not meant to do this perfectly, but as you experience your anxiety, if you can just in that moment, remind yourself that what's taking place as a healing, that's a new, powerful rep in a new transformative direction. Nobody does this perfectly, but you've got an insight now that most people don't have.

You're no longer living in the confusion and the misunderstanding that anxiety is the enemy. It's not. Anxiety is the friend. It's a natural part of the process of you healing and you want that right. You want to be healed, you want to be whole, you want to be powerful, you want to be able to make an impact on the people around you.

You want to have the space inside of you to be able to connect more deeply with spirit and to be intuitive and to be inspired and to live, and to live as an instrument of spirit, making an impact in the world, achieving your full potential. You want that right. Well, if you want that, then we've got to create space inside of you for that. Right now, your body is working on purging you of probably decades, if not years, of misunderstanding and dissonance. For that we can find great gratitude.

So I love you. I'm here with you. Stay close. Yeah, this was super powerful for me. If you know somebody who and I hope it was powerful for you If you know somebody who can benefit from hearing this, please, please, please, share it with them. And again, if you found value in this conversation today, tune in to the next conversation and leave me a review If you're listening on a podcast, or a comment if you're tuning in on YouTube.

We want to create a better world, and that starts with us supporting you in becoming all that you're capable of becoming and creating a change mind. I love you and I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks for watching. Don't forget to jump on over to the site and I will see you in the next episode.