Why chronic anxiety is so hard to heal

Chronic anxiety is very challenging to heal because of the inherently addictive nature of your feelings. Here’s why:

Your feelings in the moment are nearly impossible to change without suppression. Just try not feeling enraged when it sweeps over you. This obvious nature of your feelings is the cause of the not-so-obvious reason why certain thoughts and beliefs become impossible to change or alter.

Not all feelings are addictive; only feelings that are “non-cognitive”— meaning, they can’t tell you anything about the world, only about yourself. They are inherently egoic, self-enclosed. For instance, self-pity, shame, anger, despair.

One hallmark of them is that we wallow in them or we are stuck in them, and another is that they are usually negative. When these non-cognitive sorts of feelings get attached to certain thoughts, those thoughts become compulsive. You can’t change them.

Thus the combination of an addictive and non-cognitive feeling with a particular thought creates a finished world such as I am not good enough, I am not lovable, I am stupid, or I am a failure.

You can’t help believing such thoughts even though you know they’re not true.

This is why, for example, intrusive thoughts are so hard to shake.

The secret is to get to know the thoughts with their associated beliefs, conclusions, assumptions, and how they came into being — and all the nuances of feelings that are connected to them.

Simply shining the light of your consciousness onto them helps take away their power over you.

You can loosen the grip of the finished world such that you begin to have a choice about what you think, and how you feel about it.

But your light must be strong enough for this work. 

We built a course for exactly this purpose, that teaches you special meditation practices of connecting to your light — and giving you more agency over what you think and what you feel. Visit magenta.fm/elevatedpresence to learn more.

With love,

Louisa + Rachel