Cause of Panic Attacks & My Take
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I watched a documentary featuring Michael J. Fox. In it Fox
tries to figure out why some
people are optimistic and how being hopeful and positive affects
happiness and quality of life.
Noteworthy was his trip to a place called Bhutan. Bhutan is
small Buddhist nation situated between China and India which has a
government policy that dictates happiness. Instead of a Gross
National Product, they've adopted the idea
of
Gross National
Happiness. The Bhutanese constitution states that
government programs should be judged by the happiness they
bring rather than by the economic benefit.
This is interesting because many
folks probably think of happiness as state that just happens to
them. The truth is,
happiness takes work.
That’s why I thought discussing Bhutan was such a great
lead-in.
What I’m really getting at is that
you need to take control of your life – just as a successful person
does. If you think
about it, truly successful persons are people who’ve taken control
of their lives.
They’ve set the agenda.
You
too can set the agenda for happiness, or anything that is not
dominated by anxious thoughts.
On
a practical level, the keys to happiness and taking control of your
life require two things:
1.
Having an agenda in which you commit to taking control of your
life
and
2.
being resilient.
In
#1 above I refer to having an agenda in which you committee to
taking control of your life.
As
you’re well aware by now, if you’re a subscriber to my newsletter,
this process requires that you locate the specific Cognitive
Distortions in your thinking and then replacing them with more
realistic thoughts.
In
#2 above – being resilient – I’m referring to being committed to
working on your thoughts each day, whenever the need arises, in
spite of how poorly you might feel, how many times you’ve had
similar thoughts, etc. You need to keep at it!
We
all hold many beliefs that we’ve held for some
time. We can
often change our thinking temporarily but we need to
consistently keep working on things in order to create real
change in these deep seated beliefs.
Really, though, your thought
processes taken together are the root cause of
anxiety. While
many things can be helpful for certain, and I advocate an
holistic approach, the central “switch” is changing your
thought processes.
That is one of the primary
fundamentals stressed throughout my newsletter.
I’m
not suggesting that doing these things is a small feat but it’s
definitely worth the effort.
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