Anxiety And Telling The Truth

Dr. Mort Orman here, and today I want to continue exploring how stress and telling the truth are intimately related.

In my previous article, I shared my philosophy that the best way to eliminate stress from your life is to become better and better at telling the truth.

Telling the truth about what, you might ask?

Well, telling the truth about everything—the truth about life, the truth about you, the truth about other people, the truth about psychology, the truth about medicine, the truth about wisdom, the truth about language, the truth about being human…even telling the truth about stress itself.

So today, I want to give you a concrete example by focusing on what telling the truth has to do with anxiety.

NOTE: My comments in this article are directed to people with mild or occasional issues with anxiety. There may be more causative factors at play for people who suffer from severe anxiety disorders.

The Truth About Anxiety

What can we say that is true (or as close as human beings can get to telling the truth) about anxiety?

Here are a few general statements we can make:

Anxiety is an emotion we experience from time to time.
Anxiety can be protective for us when we are facing real, potentially harmful situations.
Anxiety can also occur for us when we are NOT facing real, potentially harmful situations.
As human beings, we can make ourselves anxious whenever we want.
There are specific thought patterns that can trigger us to feel anxious, whether we are thinking them consciously or unconsciously.
There are also specific action patterns that can result from feeling anxious, and many of these can make our anxiety problems worse.
In our culture, we tend to believe that feeling anxious or fearful is a social sign of weakness, therefore we often get embarrassed or feel shameful whenever we get triggered to feel afraid.

There now…that wasn’t so bad, was it?

You see, it’s not really difficult to specify some things that are true (or pretty close to being fully true) about anxiety or any other type of stress in our lives.

But let’s see if we can dive a little deeper.

Let’s see if we can acknowledge some “deeper” truths about anxiety that many people don’t know about and that some might actually disagree with.

Deeper Truths About Anxiety

Here are a few deeper truths about anxiety:

Most people are not clear about the specific thought patterns which generate fear/anxiety in all human beings.
Most people who have anxiety problems are not clear that the action patterns or behavior habits they have developed (to deal with their anxiety) are actually making them worse and keeping their anxiety problems from getting resolved (i.e. cured).
Human beings don’t react emotionally to things that happen in the real world outside them—they react emotionally to “internal realities” that get triggered inside their bodies, as they engage and get “stimulated” by the outside world (or by their own thoughts and beliefs).
The “internal realities” that produce our feelings of fear/anxiety can be either true or false. NOTE: these “internal realities” are usually created by the specific fear producing thought patterns and perceptions (or misperceptions) alluded to above.
When our “internal realities” are “true” we are usually in very real danger.
When they are false, we are not truly in danger, we have just been triggered to “automatically” believe (or perceive) and therefore feel that we are.
Most of the time when human beings are stressed by feeling anxious, they are not actually in any danger…they are just automatically reacting emotionally (and physiologically) to a false internal reality that has become triggered inside their bodies.

So if each of these principles (i.e., statements) about anxiety that I have just enumerated is actually true (or very close to being true), what does this say about the relationship between anxiety and telling the truth?

Well, to me it says that when you are feeling anxious, most of the time, it’s because your body is actually lying to you!

Your body has become triggered to: a) have a false internal reality automatically appear within it (usually hidden from your view), and b) your body has also been triggered to automatically “believe” that your false internal reality actually is true!

It’s important to note that neither of these two automatic responses which occur simultaneously and instantaneously within your body is under your control.

You didn’t consciously make them happen (most of the time) and you can’t really do much to keep them from happening again, in the future.

But what you do have control over is what you choose to do once you (i.e., your body) becomes triggered to feel anxious.

What Control Do You Have?

Well, you actually have several types of control.

There are a number of things you can do to deal with feeling anxious, once you become aware that you have been triggered to experience this emotion.

And of the most effective things you can do, is simply tell the truth about whatever happened that triggered you.

You just tell the truth about the triggering event, and you also tell the truth about exactly how your triggered “internal reality” is actually false.

And the moment you connect with the “real truth” about whatever happened (both outside and inside of you), your anxiety will lessen, or in many cases, it will completely disappear.

Now, it could reappear just a few moments later (because you are not really in control of what messages your body constantly sends you), but each time it does, you can just remind yourself of the “truths” you recognized just a few minutes or days earlier.

And the second, third, and fourth time you do this, you will notice that it gets easier to remember the truth, with each successive victory.

The big problem with this whole approach to understanding and dealing with anxiety is that (as I pointed out in my last article) our society discourages us from getting really good at telling the truth.

We are rarely challenged to tell these deeper truths about our anxiety (and other emotions), and therefore our skill level at telling the truth has dwindled enormously.

But the truth is the truth, whether we like it and whether we tell it…or not.

And the truth is that most of the time we are feeling anxious or afraid, our body is actually lying to us, and we are letting it get away with this.

Just like we let the media and our politicians lie to us repeatedly every day, and get away with it, we have let our truth telling “muscle” atrophy, and we are seeing a stress and anxiety epidemic because of it.

To your health, happiness and success,

Dr. Mort Orman, M.D., International Speaker, Author And Founder Of The Stress Mastery Academy | http://DocOrman.com