What is Anxiety?

What is anxiety? Well, I can tell you it's not the sign of a broken mind. If you were sitting here with me describing your anxiety, the first thing I'd ask you is, why? Why do you think you would be anxious? Why would your mind get anxious? Anxiety is a symptom. It's not the problem. So what I say to you is, if you're dealing with anxiety, let's get to the root cause. That's not the problem. The anxiety is not the issue. Anxiety comes from the mind perceiving that there's impending danger. So what it does is it goes from planning and predicting, which is then going to create more anxiety. Because your mind is going to try to predict when something's going to happen. And that's coming from previous events and experiences in your life. That's why it's happening. So Rita, when she came in to see me, started talking about how she was so anxious and she was believing that her boyfriend was going to break up with her. So she was trying to predict when it was going to happen. So she tried to plan in the beginning on how she was going to handle it. And then very quickly, she went into predicting and was telling me about how she was going to say this and that, he would say that. And all of those things were creating more and more anxiety. What her mind was trying to do was protect her from the pain. So the first thing we had to do is figure out, where is that coming from? Those were previous events and experiences that had created that feeling that something's going to happen, there's an impending danger. Once we get to the root cause, then we start to retrain the brain. We allow the brain to heal. There's nothing wrong with you, and there's nothing wrong with your mind.