Wake up to a New Year with NO WORRIES

Anxious from morning to night? Constant knot in your stomach? In a liberating new book, PAUL McKENNA reveals the simple psychological techniques that can switch off your internal panic alarm

THE events of the past few years have, unsurprisingly, conditioned many of us into letting our minds go straight to worse-case scenarios when going about our daily lives. We’re anxious, and no wonder. First, the pandemic put any sense of normality on hold. Now, having emerged from the chaos and stress of intermittent lockdowns, we find ourselves navigating a world disrupted by economic turbulence and the war in Ukraine.

I know there have been plenty of mornings when I’ve woken up wondering: ‘What else might go wrong today?’ Or when I have suddenly felt unnerved by something I can’t quite put my finger on.

We are not meant to live in a permanent state of anxiety and stress. If your default emotional setting has become fixed in a position that has you constantly primed for disaster, then it becomes difficult to relax, to feel hopeful and, ultimately, to thrive.

Now for the good news: anxiety needn’t be an insidious and unwanted backdrop to life. You can let go of your worries, turn off the fear and replace it with inner peace. And I am going to show you how.

Today is New Year’s Eve. Tomorrow will bring the dawning of not just another new day, but of a brand new year.

I want to help you step into 2023 ready to embrace the year ahead and be able to see it as one full of hope, promise and opportunity; for this to become a great turning point in your life, when you find freedom from the anxiety threatening to hold you back.

Tackling anxiety helps us to build resilience, which makes us better equipped to make the most of the good days and cope well with the bad. Ultimately, it makes you a happier person, who no longer sees threat at every turn; someone whose life feels richer, who is able to see and grasp opportunities, and who others enjoy spending time with.

I spent much of 2022 working with as many anxious people as possible. I helped them retrain their brains — through simple psychological techniques — so that they can free themselves from anxiety.

It has been wonderful to witness the positive changes these braintraining exercises have brought about in people who had become so used to living with anxiety they were convinced they had become hopeless cases. People who believed that feeling a constant level of background stress was such an intrinsic and unshakeable part of who they were, they wouldn’t ever be able to let it go.

The thing is, no matter how much it might feel like life is sometimes spiralling beyond our control, we can still be the master of our own emotions. It is perfectly possible to replace horrible feelings of tension, nervousness and an inability to relax with a renewed sense of calmness and peace.

FrEEdOm from anxiety doesn’t mean you will somehow lose your edge. Over the years I’ve worked with many high-flyers who worried that, were they to stop living life in the high state of alert that had them running off adrenalin, they’d have to trade in their motivation and drive to achieve any inner peace.

Perhaps you feel the same way, seeing anxiety as some sort of motivational strategy.

But the truth is, it stifles creativity and actually prevents people from fulfilling their true potential. That’s because constantly living in that state is exhausting and means you act in survival mode instead of considering how to best handle challenges.

What really concerns me about this new pandemic — because, let’s face it, we are living through a psychological one — is how few people have developed any real coping strategies for these heightened feelings of anxiety.

A recent YouGov study revealed that one in five of us don’t know how to deal with this difficult emotion at all.

No wonder then that every therapist I know is telling me their skills are in enormous demand.

They are being inundated with pleas for help from individuals suffering from stress-related problems: people trying to comfort eat difficult feelings away; exsmokers reunited with their cigarettes in the hope nicotine might soothe their frazzled nerves; high achievers feeling stifled by racing thoughts; all kinds of people desperate to unpick what feels like a permanent knot in their stomach. So, if you’re finding it hard to get back to business as usual, then at least take comfort from the fact you are far from alone.

You are not to blame for these negative feelings. We’ve all had so much practice at being in a state of high anxiety that we’ve become rather good at it.

Anxiety, fear, panic, stress and worry are part of the protection mechanism that keeps us safe.

For the past few years, an ancient part of our brain, the amygdala — where we perceive and process feelings of threat and fear, triggering a fight-or-flight response — has been receiving high levels of stimulation.

But even before the pandemic and the current crises, living in the modern world could trigger it unnecessarily: getting cut up in traffic, missing the train, being late for work . . . all of these things can set it off over and over again.

It is no surprise then that so many people are feeling like they have an internal car alarm going off inside them all the time.

Here’s where I come in. Over the next three days I am going to teach you how to switch that alarm off, through the latest psychological techniques.

As ever, approaches that work extremely well for some people might not have the same effect on others. That’s why I’m giving you a smorgasbord of different exercises — some providing instant fixes, others longerterm solutions for the anxiety that everyone feels at some point.

Even if you find that just one results in you feeling calmer and more resilient to life’s challenges, then having that tool at your disposal will help you to change your life for the better.

Firstly, let’s make a distinction. Concern, preparation, anticipating potential problems and heading them off at the pass are functional ways of thinking and acting.

Anxiety, however, is different. If you worry from the minute you wake up and can’t relax because you fear that if you do you will miss something, or if you can’t switch off, you are suffering from anxiety.

If you’re forever running disaster movies in your mind, have a

constant feeling of foreboding and a knot your stomach, if even when things are going fine you tell yourself it won’t last, that’s anxiety too.

If your quest for perfection drives you to high standards but you don’t enjoy it, as you are looking for faults, that is also anxiety.

But that is about to change. Today, I want to show you how to achieve immediate relief from anxiety using deceptively simple but stunningly effective PsychoSensory and Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) exercises — where touch and visualisation transform the way that you feel.

Most of us don’t realise just how much control we can have over our thoughts, as we are not taught this at school. We are told what to think, not how to think.

The mind and body are linked in a cybernetic loop — one is always influencing the other.

If you have stressful thoughts about catastrophes then that will alter your body chemistry and, in turn, change your physiology so your muscles tense up.

In contrast, when you have relaxing thoughts and think, say, about going on holiday, that changes your feelings and your body chemistry. It also relaxes your physiology.

Research also shows that nearly half of what people do every day is just a habit. Some habitual behaviour is good — for instance, you don’t have to think: ‘Shall I tie my shoelaces?’ — we just do it.

However, many people also spend their lives living in hope that calm feelings will similarly just magically show up. But how can they, when the habit that has been nurtured inside your brain is to anxiously try to anticipate every bad thing that might possibly go wrong?

When you are anxious, your sole purpose is survival. When the volume has been turned down on anxiety, you have more room to seek out and find other things that you can enjoy. That could be becoming financially independent; creating something that helps lots of people; or something as simple as being a good friend or caring for your pet.

So, where do we start? Well, how about I teach you something that will abate anxious feelings the very moment you experience them. An instant fix that will interrupt and reduce feelings of being overwhelmed, replacing them with a sense of calm and being in control.

It’s called Freeze Frame (see previous page) — it’s a quick remedy that, once learnt can be implemented any time or place you feel emotionally overwhelmed.

Used alongside the other exercises and techniques featured on these pages, you’ll be amazed how quickly it can help you to think clearly again.