05. Meaning & Focus

Your Focus Grows

If you have anxiety, it can often grow and grow. This is why focusing on actions regardless of your feelings becomes so important.

Focusing and taking action in other areas lessens the negative feelings and eventually becomes your strength.

In a lot of self-help literature, the advice is often given that, once you place your attention on something important to you, your focus can make it grow.

This is also known as the popular “Law of Attraction” which says that you bring the things into your life that you focus on the most.

That which is held in mind, tends to manifest in your life.

The problem with that is we often put the focus on our problems rather than the solutions.

The “focus” on this website is to take the focus off our anxiety and place it onto something else.

For instance, if you say you must become successful, or you must achieve something (e.g. giving up smoking), putting your attention there and focusing on it long enough will bring about the result that you achieve it.



The Paradox of Focus

When you have anxiety, the one thing that you want is a rest from it! This often results in your thinking about it over and over again.

In order to get away from it, you must divert your attention somewhere else. You must choose another focus and begin your practice on that. It won’t just work to say “I must get over this”.

When you tell yourself that, you’ve only given more of your attention to the problem. You’ve now got it right in front of you! How can you get rid of it when you are focusing on it? Instead, you have made it massively important. This is the paradoxical effect of fear.

It’s similar to trying to go to sleep when you can’t sleep. You focus on “not” being able to sleep when you’re actually desperate to go to sleep. You keep yourself frustrated and upset and you never fall asleep.

The thing is to do is to make it important enough that you’re willing to go through anything to simply leave it alone. Watch your fear but don’t participate in it.

It’s not about getting into battle with your anxiety. Once you’re “battling” it, you’re only making it worse. The key here, if you must get over something, is to carry on and do other things regardless of the feeling you are having while doing those other things.

Even when the feeling are at their worst, this is when you will make the most progress by simply watching it an going on with whatever it is you are doing. It’s what you do that counts, not how you feel.

Other self-help philosophies will say “Make it important”, “Make yourself have these massive goals!” and all this sort of business.

This only has the adverse affect.

Take your focus off the fear and place it on something that is completely separate from the issue at hand.
 
Letting Go and Moving On

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Going “head on” against your anxiety problem is only setting up a resistance and making the whole thing a big “fight” that requires extra energy.

You don’t have to make it massively important. Find a different way around it.

Take a different route and leave it behind.

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