VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:
Panic is the manifestation of fear caused by the illusion of thought. So, what do I mean by that? That’s a little something I wrote to explain where I feel like anxiety and panic, and those terrible thoughts that happen throughout the day and cause you to suffer, where they come from.
And so, if you break it down and you really look at it, where does it come from? So, panic is caused by fear, right? But where does that fear come from? And fear comes from your thoughts, right?
And the reason I said illusion of thought, is because most of the time your thoughts are not true, right? So, you have these thoughts that run rampant throughout the day and even the night, and they’re just kind of, on their own path and they’re just going, and going, and going a million miles an hour.
And most of the time you’re living in the past or the future with those thoughts. You’re thinking about the, “What if? What if? What if?” You know, “What if I have a brain aneurysm?” You know, “What if I have a heart attack? What if this food makes me sick?” So many what if’s, right? But you’re thinking about things that haven’t even happened.
So, this is an illusion. It’s an illusion of thought. And to take it even further than that, your thoughts aren’t even who you are. Thoughts are just that, they’re thoughts. Okay. They’re part of this world that you live in right now, the physical realm. It’s not really, truly who you are as an eternal being, as a spirit, as a soul, as a divine entity, as something that can never be destroyed. Right?
So, thoughts are, most of the time illusion anyway. Now, you can have these thoughts, but if you’re somebody that has general anxiety disorder or panic disorder often you are someone that’s living in the future, or you’re living in the past and those thoughts will just manifest into that fear, which will then manifest into panic.
So, I’d like to share with you a little bit about my journey and what I’ve been through. 15 years ago I went through some major panic attacks. Just hard core panic attacks and it was the toughest time in my life getting through that.
And I was able to do it though, and I was able to do it medication free and I’m not sure if I completely recommend that, but my irrational thoughts were so bad that I couldn’t even put a pill in my mouth, because I was worried that anything would kill me, even a pill.
But I’m here to tell you that you can get through it and I’m living proof of that, but it’s work. It’s a lot of hard work. And the things that I was able to do to get through my panic attacks, and my panic attacks were, just step back a little bit, were very irrational.
I always thought I was going to die. I could have a little itch on my head and I thought it was going to be an aneurysm, or just any little thing. I could eat something and I thought that, that was going to give me food poisoning and it was going to kill me.
So, that’s how bad my irrational thoughts were and how bad my anxiety and my panic were. So, I was having severe panic attacks, and I knew it was irrational, but it was really hard to get through that. And then eventually, I started to fear the actual panic attacks themselves. And that just kind of, keeps compounding and compounding, but the way to get through that, there’s lots of techniques out there, but the biggest thing you can do is try to live in the present moment and not think about the what if’s.
You know, what happened in the past or what might happen in the future. Think about the present moment you’re in right now and think about, are you okay? Are you okay at this moment? You know? Yeah, you are.
You know, 99.9% of the time, at this moment, probably as you’re watching this video you’re great, you feel fine. You’re thinking about what might happen, don’t do that. Live in the present moment.
So, I wanted to share that with you and hopefully you get a takeaway from that, but living in the present moment is just so, so powerful and it really helps in every single way, and throughout your life, because you enjoy what’s going on right now and you’re not obsessed with what might be happening or what did happen.
And with general anxiety disorder or panic disorder a lot of things help. You can exercise, I personally started exercising, I started cutting out caffeine and alcohol, I started to pray, meditation was a big part of it, but doing all of those things you can get through it and it’ll get easier, and easier, and easier.
And the biggest thing that you can do, and this is what you’ll find out if you read books or listen to tapes, or whatever. But the biggest thing you can do, is when you feel those anxious thoughts or those irrational thoughts coming on is, to embrace them. Is to embrace them. Let them happen.
You’ve got to say to yourself, “Bring it on.” You gotta say, “Let it happen.” Whatever that irrational thought is or irrational fear is, and to you it’s very real, you have to say, “Let it happen.” And you have to say, “Just do your best.” And you sit there and you wait, or you do a countdown.
And you can countdown from 21 to zero, or 10 to zero and you say, “Look, I’m going to give you 20 seconds panic to do all you can, do your worse.” And then you countdown. And by the time you get to zero you’ll realize nothing happened. And then you let it go.
I call it catch and release. Bring it in and then you release it. And then each time you do this you’re going to get stronger, and stronger, and stronger and that’s what I did. I was able to get through this and every month and every year I got stronger, and stronger, and stronger, probably after about a couple years I was feeling pretty strong, and after year five and up I was feeling really strong.
Year 10 definitely stronger and stronger. After 15 years I’m pretty much cured of my panic disorder, but from time to time I still have those irrational thoughts and sometimes it could be several times a week, but now they last seconds, they last seconds or even milliseconds. Whereas before they would last hours, if not days of pure anxiety and pure hell.
And so, by embracing the fear, embracing anxiety and then just letting it do it’s thing, which is nothing, you’ll get more powerful. But also just living in that present moment, that’s such a big, big deal. And not thinking about the what if’s. Just think about the present moment and go through your daily routine, and just keep on doing that daily routine. Don’t sit around the house, don’t lay around the house feeling sorry for yourself, just keep pushing and keep living in the present moment.
So, I know that was a lot, but I wanted to share that with you and I really hope you got something out of it today. So, all right, see you next time.
Roger Janik
