By Jenny Peterson
Today, I’m discussing a topic that hits home for many: how anxiety is the unseen glue that holds onto chronic health symptoms. I’ll unpack how anxiety and chronic health issues are intertwined, how one can amplify the other, and what you can do to break the cycle.
Anxiety is a term that a lot of us are familiar with. It gets blamed for a lot of things and serves as a reason for many people to not take particular actions.
At the root of anxiety are the subconscious patterns of feeling powerless and fearful. The belief driving it is “I don’t feel safe.” Someone that has anxiety is not in the present moment. Their mind is in the future. They are often thinking about what could happen and creating scenarios in their mind that often don’t happen. It's essentially a survival response to keep one safe.
Keep in mind that anxiety is a symptom. It's a term for what is happening in the body and mind, but the real cause is the pattern of fear and powerlessness.
Biologically, when this happens in our mind, we activate our sympathetic nervous system and our body responds as though there is a threat- only focusing on surviving.
Most of the students that we work with come into MBR knowing they have anxiety, either chronically or just for certain things, and there are also those that don’t feel that they experience it at all.
Regardless of what a person may say, whether they have anxiety or not, my MBR protocol requires everyone to work on the subconscious patterns connected to anxiety. There is a reason for this. After years of working with clients I found that no matter what their symptoms were, fear and a lack of inner power were at the root of them. When I first started MBR, 6 years ago, I didn’t have this protocol. It wasn’t until seeing that every time we didn’t work on these patterns connected to anxiety, we would end up circling back to it because it was needed to resolve the symptom. This is why I say that anxiety is the glue keeping all your symptoms from resolving. It took me just a few months to make this observation, and then the MBR protocol was changed for the better. Doing this one thing with everyone in our programs has made a huge difference in their ability to resolve their symptoms.
The thing about these patterns of feeling powerless and fearful is that they don’t just happen once in our life and never show up again. It's actually the opposite, they show up once and continue to show up because it's how our brain is designed for survival. We are designed to be in the negative and look for threats. But there is a downside to this because the more we do this, the stronger those pathways in the brain get and the harder they are to break.
So when someone has chronic conditions that don’t go away, feeling powerless and fearful (aka anxiety) it's like a persistent mosquito that is buzzing in your ear. It has a unique ability to latch onto and amplify existing symptoms.
You experience a symptom, you get worried about it, think about it not getting better, and feel powerless because nothing is working. This is the glue. This is where there needs to be a mindset shift. An “unwiring” of those old patterns that lead to anxiety.
In addition to shifting the way you respond to your symptoms, anxiety patterns are going to be at the root of all symptoms. I use the term your 2.0 self a lot because that is what we teach our students to do to resolve their symptoms. Stepping into that version of yourself requires you to let go of the old patterns that feed anxiety. Rather than fear- you trust. Rather than feeling powerless- you are powerful. When you build these new beliefs, shifting the patterns connected to all your other symptoms becomes much easier because you have the inner power and confidence to do it.
So, let's use a symptom as an example here. Let's say someone has IBS. This indicates that they have subconscious patterns connected to feeling angry, they might be passive in how they respond to things, keeping the anger inside. Now to shift whatever experiences are connected to this symptom, they will need to have the confidence to maybe speak up more and take actions rather than be passive. (This is just an example, this doesn’t mean this is exactly what to do if you have IBS.)
Now if this person needs to speak up to resolve this situation, there comes this fear of saying something. Here comes the anxiety. Because if they didn’t have a fear of speaking up to begin with, they wouldn’t have this issue. But they are passive because underneath that passiveness is a fear of what people will say or having uncomfortable consequences to that action. They probably have proof of this fear from situations in childhood to support this fear. So, to truly help this person resolve and prevent future symptoms, they really need to work on the glue that is keeping everything from resolving. The person needs to step into their power and act from trust and safety rather than fear. That is where the real work is. Once you do that, taking the action to resolve the patterns connected to IBS is much easier. In this example, the person would feel strong and confident to take the action they need or shift the perception regarding what is connected to their symptom.
So, what can you do to address this glue that is keeping your chronic symptoms from going away? Well you can work with us and we will take you through the exact steps or I suggest you learn more about the subconscious patterns connected to anxiety. I go into deeper detail about the subconscious connections to anxiety in this blog. The patterns of fear and powerlessness are all around us. We are programmed to think this way. We often get these thinking patterns from the environments we grew up in, often either due to responding to life's situations as a child with no other tools or modeling what our parents did. Shifting these old patterns connected to anxiety is not an overnight process. It's small little daily actions that add up over time.
There is tremendous payoff from working on this glue, it forever changes you and helps you step into the 2.0 version that your body is asking you to do. Whether you think you have anxiety or not, deep beneath the surface layers, you will find that the patterns of fear and powerlessness that create anxiety are at the root of your chronic conditions.
You are unique, your symptoms are connected to very specific patterns within your subconscious.
Without a plan unique to you, you will continue struggling and miss out on the life you deserve to be living! To help you get started on your long-lasting healing journey, we would love to provide you with a healing plan that is unique to you. Get your custom healing plan today!
You can also download my free healing guide, “Why Can’t I Heal” where you will learn the 5 reasons that you haven't healed despite everything you've tried. These are the missing pieces to your healing and the key to resolving your symptoms for good.
Jenny Peterson is the founder and CEO of Mind Body Rewire (MBR). She teaches those that are overwhelmed with trying to heal chronic symptoms how to simplify their healing by focusing on just one place, the subconscious mind. Learn more about MBR here.
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