The article below builds upon the book Weekes, C. (1990). Hope and Help for Your Nerves: End Anxiety Now. Penguin. as well as expands on the summary on CalmClinic written by Micah Abraham. Image by pch.vector on Freepik.
Recovery
The natural tendency that we all have in the face of anxiety is to fight it or avoid it. But this will only further fire up the nervous system when again faced with fear. The more attention you give to your sensitized nerves and the secondary reactions (e.g. brainfog, sweating) the more you will strengthen the related negative associations in your brain and nervous system.
The key is to let the nervous system fire itself and correct itself. Eventually the firing of nerves will subdue due to a lack of additional stimulation by your own bewilderment. In essence, Dr. Weekes says that a person should do just the opposite of ‘fight’ and ‘flight’ reactions and accept their anxiety, to its fullest. This means accepting all the physical and mental symptoms, which is easier said than done but can be achieved with practice. This way you will come to a point where you can detach yourself from the anxiety and panic attack and accept them as merely the malfunctioning of your nervous system.
On the basis of the above understanding, there are four stages to Dr. Weekes’ approach to coping with anxiety. They are:
- Face your fear: i.e. don’t engage in ‘flight’ stress coping behavior.
- Accept all mental and bodily symptoms as a result of an overheated nervous system, which is out of your control: i.e. don’t engage in ‘fight’ stress coping behavior.
- Float (mentally) through the negative experience and try to distance the real ‘You’ from the temporary stress reaction to maintain a positive self image. Explain to yourself that this experience isn’t ‘You’ but merely an overheated nervous system.
- Let time pass and accept that while you will make progress, from time to time old habits and conditioned chemical reactions will rear their head and throw you back a few steps.
To some people this simple 4 step cure is ‘unacceptable’ given the monstrous experience they are going through. However when you understand the underlying nervous system the simple solution makes perfect sense and opens the door to full recovery. Below we will go a bit more in-depth in each step. Of course the books and audio tapes by Dr. Claire Weekes provide a much more elaborate explanation of the phenomenon of nervous illness and the recovery method.
Face your fear
Dr. Weekes’ recommends not avoiding the situations that trigger your anxiety and panic attacks. Face them gently without judging yourself. Here it could help to apply the teachings of Psycho-Cybernetics to mentally practice how you would deal with panic attacks. For example, if your anxiety includes sleeping problems, practice positive images based upon memories of when you slept like a rose. Alternatively engage in coming up with positive images of future work and life experiences when you can not catch sleep, instead of worrying for hours.
Learn to accept your anxiety or panic.
Accept panic, or more specifically the symptoms of panic such as trembling hands, sweaty palms, a pronounced heartbeat, brainfog, and indecisiveness. Full acceptance can be difficult, especially when thoughts of past defeat linger in your mind (e.g. days where you didn’t perform your best at work). However, you need to accept what you can’t control and can’t take blame for, that is, an overheated nervous system. This does not mean that you will start to like the anxiety symptoms or panic attacks. But it does mean that you will let them run their natural course, without adding additional stress. Use the teachings of Psycho-Cybernetics to replace negative images with positive ones and ‘throw away’ negative images that remain.
“Float through” your anxiety
Floating through anxiety is basically a matter of separating yourself from your anxiety. This holds both for specific events and longer episodes of anxiety.
In a specific moment, e.g. when you need to present for a group and know you will feel anxious and produce exaggerated stress reactions (brainfog, sweating armpits and palms), this means that you try to take it easy on yourself. You will go through the presentation at a slower pace than your tightened body dictates. Most likely the spectators won’t know the difference as usually what seems to be an endless second to yourself is a totally normal passage of time for the audience. Prior to the presentation you could also engage in small talk to get into the groove of communicating. Both practices let you distance yourself a little bit from the pressure of the presentation: you take it slower and dampen the seriousness of the event by loosening up and engage in fun small talk. In some way you try to separate yourself from the experience of anxiety.
For longer episodes (e.g. bad days or rough mornings) you remind yourself that your personality as a whole is not defined by a temporarily malfunctioning of the nervous system. Your best version of ‘You’ still floats above the temporarily disrupted ‘You’, for example as you awkwardly make your way to the supermarket. You don’t feel good, you don’t look good, but often not as bad as you think.
The exercises for each step (face – accept – float – let time pass) require practice. Part of the practice can, again, be done with the help of understanding Psycho-Cybernetics, meaning that you visualize yourself successfully engaging in social situations based on real memories or positive images. In the beginning practicing these steps can feel daunting, like finding the light in the dark. However, any light that you generate is a win, however small it is.
“Let time pass”
Basically, during a panic attack episode, this means that you consciously want to fully experience the physical and mental sensations and let them continue for as long as ‘they’ want, without fighting them.
Over a longer period of time this also means that you have to accept that it takes time for the ‘conditioned’ panic attacks and nervous reactions to cease to exist. Setbacks, meaning sudden revivals of a panic attacks, are a part of the process. In between setbacks you could engage in imagining future setbacks and how you would successfully navigate them (e.g. keep calm, smile, take life a bit slower)