Many of us suffer from anxieties at different times in our lives. They can range from mild anxiousness over a life situation, all the way to total inability to perform simple activities of life, like brushing your teeth or getting out of bed. While medical treatments are effective with some people, many don't respond, remaining locked in a fearful threatening world. This article is to share how a self-help method can eliminate the crippling effects of anxiety or improve the results of anxiety medication.

What Is Anxiety? An anxiety disorder is a long-term mental condition that fills us with feelings of dread. Because of these feelings, we're willing to take fewer and fewer risks, limiting our experience of life, often imprisoning us behind bars made of fear. What makes a condition anxiety, rather than nervousness or anxiousness is the degree to which we suffer, limiting our experience of life.

What Harm Can Anxiety Do? To begin with, people don't do things they want to do. If someone has a social anxiety, they will limit their lives to non-social situations, for instance. This harms us in many ways: limited career choices, fewer friends, fewer financial opportunities, less recreational activity, even limiting romantic interests. Not only does anxiety limit us, but it can cause serious accident or embarrassment in the activities we do. The fear causes us to "choke" under pressure and make mistakes, sometimes very harmful mistakes.

What Causes Anxiety? Sometimes, anxiety disorder can be due to purely physical causes, like an imbalance of body chemicals. Once the chemicals are balanced, the mental illness is managed and the feelings subside, maybe never to return. In the more difficult and probably more common cases, the disorder is brought on by psychological conditioning and thought habit. This is more difficult because common medicines used to treat anxiety can mask the symptoms but never remove the underlying cause. If the cause is psychological, medicines merely complicate matters, making it more difficult to deal with the problem.

How Do I Recover? Anxieties with physical causes are often easily treated. Sometimes the physical condition is cleared up and no more symptoms occur. In other cases, the medicine is required long-term, to maintain the proper physical condition.

However, we can often get full recovery from psychological anxiety by managing the disorder while resolving the underlying psychological cause. With conditions as serious as anxiety, always consult your doctor before changing anything about your treatment. That said, the self-help techniques in the BAR Cycle (see article) can be very useful to recover from psychological anxiety and even to aid in controlling the symptoms of physical anxiety.

The reason the BAR Cycle techniques are effective is because psychological anxiety is rooted in false beliefs about yourself, risks and danger. As you follow the techniques to change Beliefs in the BAR Cycle article, your Actions will change, leading to different and more positive emotional Results. Initially, you should be better able to handle stressful situations. Over time, these positive Beliefs, Actions and Results will overcome and eliminate the root causes of the anxiety, leading you to a normal, fulfilling, healthy attitude of life.

Personally, I suffered from social and performance anxieties, which blocked my career advancement and limited my social life. By using the BAR Cycle techniques, I was able to confront my fears bit by bit, and, within a few years, I was speaking and even singing in front of crowds of over 1,000 people. I began a career working with people and have been doing so for about 20 years since.

Anxieties are serious disorders that can be extremely limiting to life, and often lead to even more serious conditions. While some anxieties require medicine, many can be helped or eliminated by the self-help techniques described in the BAR Cycle. If you've suffered the limitations of anxiety for very long and nothing seems to work, maybe it's time to take the, now, unorthodox approach of helping yourself.

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