What is anxiety? Illness or ?

We have all probably asked ourselves: Why do I have anxiety? Why me?

I asked myself that question for 38 years. In 2016 I had enough and started researching anxiety on my own. I wanted to find out what was being overlooked, since I had been living with the symptoms for 38 years without anything helping.

After two years I found the answer.

The answer is the memory of the first anxiety attack.

Think about it. You had no problem with anxiety before you experienced it the first time. The first attack kickstarts everything that follows. Not as a disease, but as a fear of experiencing it again. All you thought about was how to avoid it happening again.

That was when the shift happened. You could now remember, and therefore fear, that it would happen again.

You got so scared of a repeat that you went to see your doctor. There are obviously many reasons people do that, but they all lead, without anyone realizing it, back to the same thing: the desire to avoid it happening again. That visit changed your life completely, because you got a diagnosis instead of an explanation of your own body chemistry and what it is capable of doing inside you. You were not prepared for what you felt. It caught you completely off guard, so you panicked. That is entirely normal. You were not sick when you experienced the anxiety. You were frightened by the discomfort it created in your body.

The question now is: did the diagnosis change your understanding of what you experienced as anxiety? Did the diagnosis calm you down? Did you feel less anxiety afterward? Did you think about it less? Did you understand what was happening? Did the diagnosis stop the fear of more anxiety? Or did you end up living with the fear of more anxiety for weeks or months, while you waited for the effect of SSRI medication or therapy to kick in?

If it is not the memory that makes you take medication every day, then what is it? What are you thinking when you take it? What happens the day you forget it? You panic until you have taken it. I know that from personal experience. More than 12 years of daily SSRI use. I have gone home from work more than once just to take the pill. That is how much I feared the anxiety coming back.

When I understood the role of memory in keeping the fear of anxiety alive, I developed a method to overwrite that memory. I became free of anxiety and have been ever since.

When I put the method online for free in 2020, many people experienced the same thing. The feedback since then has confirmed the pattern again and again. The anxiety disappears when you no longer fear it.

The truth is that you only fear anxiety because you do not understand why you suddenly experience it. Where did it come from? What is it? What created the discomfort? Those unanswered questions are what generate the thoughts about it happening again. Lack of information and knowledge creates the thoughts and the fear.

We get handed different explanations for what causes anxiety. But does the cause really matter when it comes to whether you feel the anxiety again? The truth is that every cause produces the same adrenaline discomfort. So we can rule out the cause as the problem and focus on the fear of the discomfort itself.

The treatment vacuum in anxiety diagnoses.

Why do we give people an anxiety diagnosis without any immediate treatment, but instead a treatment vacuum of weeks to months, during which the fear of more anxiety is allowed to grow? We would never accept that with any other diagnosis. We accept it here because this is not a disease but a fear. With a real disease, we would never allow a wait of weeks to months before treatment takes effect.

Anxiety diagnoses belong in a completely different category from other psychiatric diagnoses. There is no mental state to heal, no altered perception of reality, no depression, no changed view of the world. Anxiety does not change you physically or mentally. We know this because everything in the body returns to normal once the adrenaline has left. Between adrenaline releases, you are demonstrably fine, physically and mentally. You can physically do whatever you want, but you avoid it out of fear of the discomfort. Everything works normally. Only the memory of the discomfort remains. And then the tragic thing happens. The fear of more discomfort makes us call in sick, isolates us, and in the end puts us on disability. Why. Because the system tells us that experiencing your own body chemistry as unpleasant is a disease.

The fear of anxiety can only be overcome through education and accurate information about the discomfort you fear.

Maybe you are thinking right now, well my anxiety is different, this does not apply to me. But I can tell you that your anxiety is just like the anxiety of roughly 400 million other people. Anxiety only works one way. You fear it, or it is not anxiety.

Without the fear, there is no anxiety. Again, you had no fear of anxiety before you experienced it the first time.

If you want to be free of anxiety, you can be, just as you were before you experienced it the first. That is possible for anyone who accepts what I am writing here and tries the CCT technique. It takes time, like everything else that needs to change. A short time for some, longer for others. Time is the only factor.

Start by proving to yourself that your fear of anxiety is not caused by your memory of past anxiety. Can you do that?

Ask yourself: would I have anxiety if I had no memory of the discomfort? Would I have gone to the doctor, taken medication, or gone to therapy?

Now only the choice remains. Do you want to continue as you are, or do you want to try something different?

This text is the starting point for all the information you will find here at Generation Anxiety.

Anxiety is not a disease. It is a fear of experiencing it again. And you can prove that yourself by following what I describe here.
To sum up: So why do we fear anxiety? For the simple reason that we remember the discomfort it caused in the past.
If you don’t agree, you can email me at account.dk@gmail.com. I’m always ready to discuss anxiety.

Thomas Fogh Vinter