What Causes Anxiety?

If you have anxiety or panic attacks, or even a specific anxiety disorder, what's causing it you may ask?

This is a question that can be answered on many different levels, depending on how far down the rabbit hole you're prepared to go.

And it depends on the causes in your individual situation.

Let's go from the most simple, to the more deep causes.

But what you should understand right now, is that the reason for looking at possible past and present causes of your anxiety or panic, is not to spend your energy being stuck in this stage of your development.

Many people in fact do just this…

They find an apparent cause, which they're feeling and remembering in a way that makes them unable to realise:

1. that the emotions they don't like are not caused by someone else (such as "it was because they did this to me, or they made me so angry") or

2. that the emotions they don't like may be self created (such as "if only it turned out this way, or if only I did this")

The point is, the most important thing to do at any stage you're at, is to learn the life lesson that the negative events or emotions are trying to teach you (sometimes for a long time), so that you can move on.

To do this, you usually need to both:

1. learn the lesson that this problem is trying to teach you, and

2. use methods to break the anxiety and panic routines or programs that have run so many times in your mind that they have become the "default software" of your mind

Sometimes doing number 1 leads to a cure of number 2, but very often, especially if the anxiety or panic is quite prominent, it is helpful to do number 2 in order to establish new emotional states.

In some people, this second step is even more critcal as the anxiety has even an "emotional addiction".

You are so familiar with the negative emotion of anxiety that you will feel as if you would no longer know who you are and how to relate to others if you didn't have them.

If you don't change this, you'll keep experiencing the same experiences in life.

So here are the "causes" of anxiety, from the simplest to the more complex:

1. Poor diet: caffeine, high GI food, artificial colors, flavors and preservatives causing excessive adrenaline, hyper and hypoglycemia intervals and toxic effects all causing anxiety.

2. Lack of exercise and fitness, and therefore lack of production of natural antidepressants and endorphins.

3. Lack of time to the self and meditation causing a lack of time in alpha, gamma and delta brainwaves resulting in lack of insight and understanding.

4. Negative childhood experience, can be even only 1 - 2 episodes, which caused a severe loss of self esteem.

5. Lack of love, acceptance and nurturing from parents resulting in negative self image.

6. Inadequate self image resulting in less ability to handle a variety of life situations.

7. Unresolved issues eg anger, guilt, shame resulting in continuous emotional energy either suppressing or time occupied with these issues, and therefore little remaining emotional energy to handle life.

8. These same unresolved issues from the past or present resulting in an inability to connnect fully with others or the world.

9. Massive doubt about whether you can achieve something, or whether you can achieve it by a certain time.

10. A low threshold of what everyday as well as not so everyday things in life you can handle, because of

11. Lack of intimacy with the self and not realising that you can have conscious choice over how your mind and body responds to anything in life.

12. Mistaking the mind and body for your awareness. That is, having absolutely no wide perpective from your consciousness (the real you) about what is happening in your life.