Let me ask you something, do you have a CLEAR vision of how your life will look when you fully recover from your anxiety disorder? If not, don’t expect things to change too much in the near future (painful but true). How will your relationships with your loved ones and co-workers look? How will you be using your personal leisure time differently? What will your health and energy levels look like? Do you know what one of the most important essential needs for a human being is? It’s called growth. If you’re not growing and improving on the many aspects of your life, then you’re only existing, not living. A few years back, I ran into a movie called “The Secret”. In this movie they talked about the idea of a vision board. The movie shared lots of other theories that were hard to take seriously, but the idea of a vision board was genius. I began turning my attention to how my life would be different not if but WHEN I got over my Generalized Anxiety Disorder, and created a vision of how wonderful my life would be anxiety-free. With this new focus came the juice that pushed me in the direction to take some kind of action daily.

Yesterday, I asked a good friend I was helping to get over their GAD and mild depression a question. The simple question was, “What changes do you want to create in your life that would make you feel better about yourself?” His answer was, “I want to lose weight, make more money, and spend more time with my kids.” Do you see the problem with this answer? It’s too general! Your mind doesn’t understand general statements like these. It doesn’t have a direction to move into, and it doesn’t help show you what actions you need to take in order to achieve your final goal! Here’s the answers he should have come up with and later did, “I want to lose 5 pounds by the end of this week and 30 pounds by the end of the month, I want to double my monthly income by fall of next year, and I want to dedicate one hour per day to my kids and teach them a different skill related to sports each day”. These goals are powerful, specific and ACTUALLY begin the process of creating a change.

Let’s do an exercise that will promote change now. Write down how your panic and anxiety are affecting the 7 main aspects of your life which are: health, social life, career, leisure time, family life, religion and spirituality, and education. Now start writing how things would be different in those aspects of your life once you’ve overcome Generalized Anxiety Disorder and panic attacks. Finally, write down what you can do right NOW, at this moment, to take baby steps in order to get the ball rolling in at least one of those 7 aspects of your life.

Conclusion: Many people believe that we as a society are becoming lazier and lazier. I believe that we’re not lazy; we just aren’t clear about what it is we really want. We don’t live with enough purpose; it wasn’t until I started to get specific and had a vision of how I wanted things to look WHEN I recovered from heightened daily anxiety levels that my mind became less occupied with fear. So my challenge for you is to write as much as you can through the exercise that is outlined here, and get your mind working for you rather than against you.

Author's Bio: 

Professional athlete as well as mental health expert, my goal is to inspire and lead anyone suffering from the many mental health disorders. 6 years of emergency visits to doctors, and uncontrollable nervousness fueled by multiple physical symptoms has taught me how precious life really is, I wasted a lot of time worrying about fears that never came true, and now I want to show you how I turned it all around.