How can I reduce how often I get anxious without having to use medication?

Hey Mark,

I've read your '5 Sure-fire Ways to Overcome Fear and Anxiety Today' and it made me think it might work, but is there any way to reduce the times you get anxiety attacks without medication?

I know I could try and deal with them with your AWARE technique each and every time, but I don't really want them to happen that often (or at all), if possible.

I had a bad experience with medication, so I don't want to use them if possible. Thanks.

This question was submitted by 'Levi'

Mark says...

Hi Levi, and thanks for posting!

When you let anxiety know who's boss (and here's a clue: it's you, not it!), then you need to be able to stop it in its tracks before it gets going. Like training a dog that it doesn't need to bark at every passerby, it takes a little while. But unlike training a dog, you can rehearse ahead of time so that your 'emotional brain' knows how to behave ahead of time.

For example, take time to relax and if you know self-hypnosis, put yourself into a light super-calm state. And when you are nicely relaxed, you can rehearse the typical types of situations or times when before anxiety would have spoiled things, but now hypnotically experience being calm and relaxed in those situations. When you do this, anxiety gets 'trained' to stay away and only be used when there's a real emergency.

If you don't yet know how to use hypnosis, you can check out our free hypnosis course, which will be updated soon, or you can check out one of our overcome anxiety audio downloads, such as 'Overcome Fear and Anxiety'.

Anxiety isn't a disease or illness. It's an essential human response, so it seems a shame to medicate it with potentially side-effect-inducing drug products. The more you can tame anxiety naturally, the better. You might also like to check out the '5 Tips for Generalized Anxiety Disorder' article, but remember: you can train anxiety quickly and more easily than perhaps you realized.

All the best,

Mark