Vaporize Your Anxiety

[Guest guest]

Happened to come across this book with this title a few weeks ago at the

bookstore while going through a period of increased anxiousness, and it has made

a tremendous impact on my daily anxiety levels...like hardly any at all anymore

I think it works will with the Willingness part of ACT, and I will try to

explain it.

What Tom Stone (author) researched, is that the period between infancy and

verbalization, where we feel feelings yet haven't formed the capacity to handle

intense feelings, we try to surpress and escape them, and begin to automatically

resist them....as we grow into adulthood, our bodies/brains form the ability to

handle these feelings, yet we continue to automatically resist them due to our

preverbal conditioning...

Anxiety is the result of our inability to fully experience the intense emotional

energy of fear that is held in the body as a result of believing it will

overwhelm us, much of which happens very early on in childhood.

So while anxiety dwells on the thinking level, it can never be fully processed

through the thinking level, because it's origin is on the feeling level...which

is something I can painstakingly attest to...my anxiety would come and go, and I

generally used critical thinking to get myself out of it or keep it at bay, but

it would always come back, because I was always using thinking as a way to

resist 'feeling', and doing whatever I could to escape feeling that way.

Tom gives some good tools (while not necessarily new) to bring your awareness

into the very center of these uncomfortable feelings, using thought as the the

stimulus, allowing yourself to fully process these held-in feelings of fear that

you have been resisting..

For me, the results have been remarkable, the effect has been a dramatic

decrease in daily anxiety, far less fear reactions, and much more confidence in

handling the feelings of fear...I noticed its effects immediately from the very

first time I started doing it, and it has progressively gotten better...and

since I have been practicing it for a few weeks now, it is becoming automatic

for me to go in and feel rather than mentally resist, and when I do mentally

resist, I zero in on the feeling that comes with it, and I process that too...I

have become much more grounded in my body, rather than constantly being 'in my

head'.

Anyways, I thought it may be helpful for some and thought it was worth sharing

if anybody was interested.

The book is called " Vaporize Your Anxiety " by Tom Stone

Best of luck