Transcript

Hi, this is Sharon. Everywhere I teach people describe how the mounting anxiety is a modern life exhausts them. They want help to remain calm and confident amid so much danger, real and perceived. My dear friend Silvia Borstein once described anxiety as a free floating hyperactivity of the mind. I would add that anxiety doesn't just float, it intensifies, building one conjecture upon the next. It can be very harsh. He might even feel anxious about having anxiety, and it gets stronger. A friend sent me an old Peanuts cartoon of Charlie Brown sitting up in bed in the middle of the night saying, my anxieties have anxieties that captures the proliferation of anxieties perfectly.

Everyone feels some anxiety at times. If I ask participants in my seminars who among them suffers from anxiety, almost every hand goes up. In one way, anxiety is essential to live. We need a few basics to survive food, water and shelter. sustaining those three essentials requires vigilance and anxiety accelerates you. heightens awareness focuses the senses, and alerts the reflexes. These are all aroused because of a genuine threat. They form a particular intelligence and response to fear. But when those senses are piqued by imaginary threats, we become consumed by anxiety.