Anxiety is often thought of as something that other people experience. I am finding that many people have more anxiety than they realize. It may not keep them from leaving the house or working. However, their anxiety acts like a low-grade fever that robs them of vitality and feeling good or even great.

Looking back, I now realize how much my busy mind was keeping my own low grade anxious feelings churning.  I thought I was problem solving but in reality, it was worry and rumination. I had got used to those feelings, so they didn't really get noticed until my adrenalin was really flowing. Some part of me felt congruent with the height of adrenalin (and as my father would say) "the joy of meeting yourself coming around the corner!" This resulted in using food to de-stress, feeling restless a good deal of the time, an irregular heartbeat and lower back problems.

Over 15 years ago, I began to learn more about the brain and anxiety. The way your brain fires is the way it wires is neurosciences way of saying that you can literally get neurologically addicted to your negative feelings. After working on becoming less tolerant of stress and feeling anxious, I began to rewire my brain and set point for feeling anxious.

When I realized that my worry and stress was rewiring my brain to make it easier to get stressed, I knew it was time to run an experiment on myself. So, I decided that whenever I got to a five or higher (zero to ten scale with zero being chill and 10 being in extreme anxiety), I would use tapping on acupoints or listening to brainwave entrainment music to shift my nervous system. Instead of focusing on the content of my anxiety, I focused on shifting my nervous system once I had a fix on what was bothering me.

Withing 3 weeks, I was going to sleep with greater ease, by 8 weeks I was feeling much calmer than I had in a long time. By six months, it really felt like my brain had established a new pattern. I was able to center myself much quicker (sometimes with just one deep breath) and sit with my feelings more easily, without getting up over a 5. 

Today, I intervened much quicker (with my go to shifting tools) to mentally reboot and shift my nervous systems response to life's event. As a result, my relationship with food is healthier, my back is the best it has been in decades and my irregular heartbeat has vanished.

Rick Hanson in his book "The Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love & Wisdom," states that we are designed to be pretty chill 98% of the time. 2% of the time we may actually need to be jazzed up to fight or run when there is true life and death danger. The problem is, as life and our brains have evolved, we can create all sorts of scenarios in our head that get us to react physiologically as if something is dangerous, when it is not!

Learning to calm an over reactive nervous system is about learning to get out of your head into your life. Most of the stuff we fear never happens.

My go to tools today are brainwave entrainment music, tapping on acupoints, Intention Energy Process and sound therapy.

Here are some links to resources that I used today…

www.Intentiontapping.com click here

www.Biolateral.com click here

www.Brainsync.com click here

My Meditative Sound Channel www.youtube.com/@GregCarpenter click here

Native Flute Sound Meditations Albums www.gregcarpenter.bandcamp.com 
click here