Crush Your Anxiety

By Dan Leigh

What If I Told You There's A Better Way To Improve Your Chronic Anxiety?

 

Imagine how much better your life would be if you were not burdened by chronic, debilitating anxiety. How elated would you feel if you could do anything you wish, without anxiety being a consideration? The world would seem brand new as you took on exhilarating new experiences that used to scare you to death. You would be on top of the world, feasting on the glorious wonders of life.

 

But, what if your anxiety stays the same, or gets worse? Your world will keep shrinking. Your relationships, finances, health, and career will suffer as you drown in a sea of anxiety. You only have a certain number of days in your life, so it's tragic to waste them riddled with anxiety, fear, and worry. You don't want to look back and say:

Anxiety ruined my entire life.

 

I have suffered from anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) for two decades, so I understand how you feel. Many times, I have felt hopelessness and despair. Anxiety often wins the battle, but along the way I have learned much about reducing its impact on my life.

During my 20+ years of dealing with anxiety and OCD, I have learned specific strategies and habits for reducing anxiety and improving mood. In Crush Your Anxiety,

I detail 44 habits you can incorporate into your life to reduce anxiety, worry, and fear. Because anxiety is chronic, the best approach for managing it is to use "anti-anxiety" habits you practice regularly. You starve anxiety at its source by crowding out the bad habits that feed it.

 

In this book you will learn habits that encompass many areas of your life. Many of these habits take less than 10 minutes a day and require no special equipment or financial investment. These habits, when used in combination, can have dramatic effects on your life. So, you won't just be improving your anxiety. You'll be improving your entire existence! I also include tips and strategies for succeeding with habit change and resources to help you work with these habits.

 

In Crush Your Anxiety, you'll discover…

• How to supercharge your productivity by implementing 4 simple habits (Hint: the more you get done, the less anxious you'll be!)

• How to use a powerful 2000+ year old spiritual practice without spending decades as a monk!

• How to spend quality time in nature, even if you live in a concrete jungle!

• Why refined sugar is bad for anxiety, and what to use instead (Hint: the healthy sweeteners taste better!)

• How to avoid one common mistake that brings you anxiety by the truckload!

...and much more!

 

Want to Learn More?

 

Grab your copy of Crush Your Anxiety today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dan Leigh
• Release date: Mar 16, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393013198

Book preview

Introduction

As a longtime obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) sufferer, anxiety has greatly affected my life for decades. I’m not referring to the mild anxiety one might have before an exam or an important job interview. I am referring to a vicious, soul-searing anxiety that permeates my entire being. I’m also referring to milder waves of anxiety I experience countless times each day, when faced with an obsession or fear.

These are extreme symptoms, and OCD is an extreme anxiety disorder. What this disorder has taught me is the importance of filling my life with positive, beneficial habits that help decrease my anxiety symptoms.

You might be dealing with mild anxiety symptoms or a full-blown anxiety disorder. Either way, this book can help you. How can it help?

Habits are the pillars of our lives. Each of us has many habits, which form the building blocks of our existence. Sure, spontaneous events and actions also pop up, but habits make or break our lives. As a result, habits are our greatest weapons against anxiety or the greatest drivers of our anxiety. Habits can be your best friends, or your worst enemies.

My aim with this book is to give you tools to make your habits friends in the battle against anxiety.

In the sections that follow, I will introduce you to 44 beneficial habits, grouped into eight sections. I grouped the habits into these sections because this will make it easier for you to choose the particular habits that best suit your life.

I group the habits into the following categories.

• Morning habits

• Dietary habits

• Movement habits

• Social habits

• Nature habits

• Productivity habits

• Mental weightlifting habits

• Mindfulness habits

Some of these categories might sound foreign to you while others will be familiar. For example, we all have dietary habits, but not all of us have mindfulness habits. I encourage you to consider the habits in these less-familiar sections because I’ve included them for good reason!

This book contains 44 habits, and you will have freedom of choice about which habits to implement. Habit change is a long-term endeavor, and you can begin with as little as one habit. Then, build from there over time by incorporating additional habits into your life. If you incorporate even a small fraction of these 44 habits into your routine, then you will experience major benefits in your anxiety levels and overall happiness.

1

Why Habits for Anxiety

I am baffled, because anxiety is often referred to as an affliction, or disorder. Society seems to regard anxiety as an illness, similar to measles or mumps. My opinion is that a person suffering from chronic anxiety is akin to a person who is out of shape because of living a sedentary lifestyle and eating too much junk food. We wouldn’t say the person is out of shape because of an illness. We would say the person is out of shape because he or she doesn’t exercise enough and eats the wrong foods! The person is overweight because of bad habits.

If you suffer from chronic anxiety, you largely got that way because of bad habits you accumulated over many years. Sure, chronic anxiety involves other factors. For example, some people are more prone to anxiety than others. Some people have little or no anxiety despite any bad habits they might have because of their inherent disposition. I’m jealous of those people!

Many of us are born with anxious personalities. Because you are reading this book, I am guessing this applies to you. Those of us with anxious personalities can develop serious anxiety problems if we are not careful to avoid developing habits that feed our anxiety. However, society teaches us little about habits, so most of us develop a plethora of anxiety-provoking habits.

These anxiety provoking habits include the following.

1. Avoiding scary situations

2. Not eating a healthy diet free of processed foods

3. Not breathing correctly

4. Living a sedentary lifestyle

5. Enduring chronic stress

In this book, I will introduce a revolutionary approach to anxiety relief. This approach is based on helping you to replace anxiety-provoking habits formed earlier in your life with positive habits that support reduced anxiety.

Therapies such as cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) can be highly effective for anxiety. However, if your habits are working against you rather than for you, therapies such as CBT might offer little benefit.

This book makes a great adjunct to therapy because it provides habits that work in conjunction with traditional therapies, such as CBT. I am a proponent of including as many antianxiety protocols in treatment as possible. We should attack anxiety from all angles, and habit change is perhaps the most effective angle I have found.

In a nutshell, I am not suggesting you discontinue your therapy or your medication. I am providing you with habits that can complement your treatment regime and enhance your life.

A Note on My Previous Book

The first book in this series is called Tame Your Anxiety. If you have read Tame Your Anxiety, you might be curious about the differences between that book and this one.

The subtitle of Tame Your Anxiety is 14 Habits to Reduce Worry, Boost Your Mood, and Take Control of Your Fear. The overall premise of both books is similar, and that premise is that habit change can greatly benefit anxiety. However, Tame Your Anxiety focuses on broader, less specific habits. Tame Your Anxiety paints in broader strokes, while this book emphasizes the finer details.

As I was writing Tame Your Anxiety, I wished I could include dozens of habits in the book, rather than just 14. So, I wrote another book that includes over 40 habits to reduce anxiety . . . and this is it. Think of Tame Your Anxiety as a broad overview, and this book as a large collection of habits to help you apply the principles of Tame Your Anxiety even more fully.

The two books share a few habits, but mostly the habits are unique to each book. I recommend you use both books in tandem because they complement each other!

2

4 Reasons Positive Habits Help Reduce Anxiety

There are many reasons that positive habits can help reduce anxiety. After all, habits affect every aspect of our lives. Below, I have listed four of the most prominent reasons I believe positive habits are powerful weapons for reducing anxiety.

1. Positive Habits Bypass Motivation

Chronic anxiety suffocates our motivation. It makes us feel terrible. By having strong habits in place, we can bypass low motivation and focus on positive activities. Once a habit is firmly established, it is easier to perform the habit than to not perform it. Even on the least motivated of days, strongly established habits are easy to perform. This makes them invaluable.

2. Positive Habits Are Simple

You do not have to learn a bunch of theory to perform habits because you are working with concrete actions that exist in the real world. You simply have to perform these actions consistently to get results. I am a fan of maintaining simplicity whenever possible, because it always leads to more consistent implementation.

3. Positive Habits Crowd Out Bad Habits

Remember when I mentioned that many years of bad habits have caused your anxiety problems? Well, by installing positive, beneficial habits in your life, you can crowd out the bad habits that have fed your anxiety. Eating junk food, avoiding social situations, and too much time spent indoors are just a few of the bad habits that feed anxiety. If you implement a good