Welcome to another Happy Snack at Noon, the 6 Figure Academy’s weekly live “snacks” where we talk about money flow, mindset optimization, or more importantly, life mastery around happiness.
This week we’re going to be talking about anxiety attacks. Why? Because a lot of what we do here is to help people around anxiety, specifically around money anxiety, which then leads to all other types of anxiety.
Anxiety is a very unique emotion because it’s one of the only emotions that can be felt in the future. Anxiety is a future-based fear, which then leads to symptoms that let us know that we’re feeling anxious. Other emotions like anger, sadness, fear, guilt, are felt in the present. Sure, when we think of a memory, we can feel the emotions from that memory, but what’s actually happening on a psychological and unconscious level is that you are literally transporting yourself mentally and emotionally back in time in order for you to experience that emotion or memory. When you realize that all of this is occurring in the unconscious mind, it can better help you understand how to deconstruct and decipher the challenges that we impose upon ourselves, such as anxiety attacks.
It’s no surprise that more people are experiencing some form of an anxiety attack and many of them are taking medication for it. There are some people who buy into the belief that anxiety pills are due to genetics, but the reality is none of us are born anxious. Some of us were born with a higher propensity to access states of anxiety, but it doesn’t mean we were born anxious. That anxiety comes from societal beliefs and perceptions, and also how you’re nurtured to perceive life. The mind is taught to think, “If this happens, then this will happen, then this will happen…” In other words, anxiety is a fear of a circumstance that has yet to happen.
For example, you might have financial problems and it’s making you feel anxious, but it’s not the financial problems themselves that cause anxiety; it’s the potential of what might happen should this specific circumstance continue down the road in the future that causes anxiety. This is the future-based fear. If you presented this problem to an infant or a kid, they would have no idea how to process this problem; however, what can happen is that they’ll potentially pick up on your emotional state of mind i.e. your anxiety. In this way, anxiety can be taught and it creates this vicious cycle that can be passed from generation to generation.
Anxiety is a learned behavior response to a set of stimuli and depending on how you handle it, it can turn into this big loop, which eventually leads to an anxiety attack. The reason why it’s so important to understand how anxiety works is so that you can understand how to deconstruct it and lessen the number of anxiety attacks you have. A lot of people have no idea where the attack is coming from and they continue to medicate the anxiety. Throughout the years, we have helped so many of our students or clients recognize that medication is simply a stop-gap to get to a certain point where they are self-empowered and can potentially stop medication in the long run (of course, consult your physician first as we’re not doctors).
As we mentioned before, anxiety is a future-based fear, meaning you’re fearing something that has yet to happen. All other possibilities in the future have been muted or distorted so that all you can focus on is that one end result that you’re afraid of.
How can we resolve this?
What we want to do is get to the root cause of what your body is actually doing to protect you. It may not feel like it’s helping you when you’re having a panic attack, but deep down, your unconscious mind has learned self-protection. Think about it. If you’re fearing for something that potentially might happen in the future, having an anxiety attack may influence you to make a different decision so that the potential end result in the future doesn’t happen. You end up exploring all the possibilities of the anxiety attack: is this feeding a belief about myself? Is this making me focus on a certain thought?
Another example: There was a client who felt anxious every time they made a bit more money. It might sound strange, but this person actually had a self-sabotaging routine of making money and then losing it all. They would feel anxious until all their money was gone and then the anxiety attacks would also disappear. The reason for all the anxiety when they had money? They feared they would lose their friends, feared they’d be judged (for having too much money), feared they would be robbed, feared they would pay a lot of taxes. So they would self-sabotage, so to speak, to go back to the familiarity of not having money.
So you don’t resolve the anxiety itself because that’s simply a feedback mechanism. What you need to do is go back to where you learned and how you learned to have those anxious beliefs in the first place. That’s what you can do to unpack it.
Another strategy you can employ is to remember that anxiety is fear of what will happen in the future. The unconscious mind can actually transport itself throughout time because it doesn’t care about time, so try to imagine an end result that is different than what you are anxious about. Bring in as much detail to that new end result as you can so your unconscious mind believes in this different result and doesn’t turn to anxiety as a self-protection tool.
Once you start to embrace anxiety and anxiety attacks as a feedback mechanism and not the problem in and of itself, that’s when you can truly get to the bottom of it and stop these attacks from happening. Again, if the attacks are so overwhelming that you can’t manage, medication is helpful. We recommend that clients consult their doctor to make sure that their anxiety is being handled in an appropriate way.
Watch the full video below:
We hope you enjoyed this Happy Snack! If you have more questions about this post, leave a comment below. Give us a thumbs up or a thumbs down to let us know how we’re doing; all feedback is always appreciated. We want to continue to provide the best happy snacks for you to help transform your life and become a self-empowered human being. See you next week for another Happy Snacks at Noon!
Learn more about money and happiness here: https://go.the6figureacademy.com
