The good news first: For several years now, there has been a self-therapy for anxiety disorders that has an above-average success rate. We will soon discuss which therapy this is and whether it might be suitable for you. The bad news is that you should invest at least 7 hours of your time to learn this technique effectively so that you can apply it to yourself.
Overview of All Topics
But why is self-therapy even sensible? There are three main reasons why more and more individuals are seeking self-therapy rather than placing themselves in the hands of certified therapists:
- They do not want their environment to know about their anxiety disorder.
- They have to wait too long for a suitable therapy slot.
- They have already undergone one or even several therapies without achieving the desired success.
Regardless of which of these reasons apply, there is much to be said for taking responsibility for your mental health into your own hands again, as you are by no means alone with this problem:
Surprising Facts About Anxiety Disorders
People suffering from anxiety disorders long for nothing more than to regain trust in their own bodies. What burdens these patients heavily is the notion that mental disorders are still often seen as their own fault, or even as imagination or weakness. Many affected individuals join self-help groups before consulting a doctor, due to the immense pressure not to disappoint family, friends, or colleagues if a panic attack once again prevents them from fulfilling their social obligations.
This underlying fear of another panic attack leads to constant tension throughout the body, resulting in muscle tension and continuous arousal. Relaxation techniques can counteract this intense physical tension. In many cases, these anxiety reactions with symptoms such as inner restlessness, palpitations, nausea, or chest pressure diminish somewhat in their intensity. These relaxation methods are particularly effective when fears are not yet too pronounced.
However, in the majority of cases, they do not help to permanently get rid of panic disorders and anxiety attacks. Nevertheless, they bring at least some calm into life, which is why I do not want to withhold these methods as relaxing self-help tips.
Anxiety Disorders: When Trust in Your Own Body Is Lost
The word “fear” is millennia old. The origin of the word speaks volumes: Angst comes from the Greek verb “agchein” and the Latin “angere.” Translated, both mean “to choke,” “to constrict the throat”. Fear is a normal feeling that has warned us of dangers since ancient times. But when fear dominates life, the step into an anxiety disorder is often not far off. According to the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (ADAA), around 18% of the American population suffers from an anxiety disorder. That’s about 40 million adults in the United States alone. Anxiety has become a widespread disease, and its manifestations are diverse. Panic disorders, agoraphobia (fear of crowds), social phobias, specific phobias, generalized anxiety disorders, and anxiety mixed with depressive disorders. But unlike other illnesses, anxiety disorders are rarely discussed. After all, who likes to talk about suffering from a specific phobia when the object of fear is darkness, noise, confined spaces, social contact, or even snow?
PME: A Technique to Relieve Tension in Your Body During Stressful Situations
Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PME) by Edmund Jacobson is a simple relaxation technique you can try on your own. Born in Chicago in 1888, Dr. Jacobson discovered that tension and effort cause muscle fibers to shorten. He also found that reducing muscle tension lowers the arousal of the central nervous system, which many people with anxiety or panic disorders suffer from. Jacobson concluded that relaxation exercises positively affect psychotic disorders.
Since individuals with anxiety disorders often do not perceive everyday stress, this method is well-suited for some patients to reconnect with their bodies and actively induce relaxation. The exercises involve briefly and gently tensing specific muscle groups, followed by consciously experiencing the relaxation that comes with releasing the tension. The term “progressive muscle relaxation” indicates that multiple muscle groups are integrated into the exercises. For example, squinting the eyes, raising the shoulders, clenching the fists, or curling the toes are alternated with relaxing the respective muscle regions. The goal is to develop a routine of muscle relaxation that can be applied in any stressful situation, ultimately reducing the overall tension in the body.
To learn progressive muscle relaxation, there are books, CDs, apps, or videos on YouTube. One advantage of this relaxation method is that individuals do not have to wait for a therapy slot. Additionally, they are not confronted with their feelings but can instead focus on the movement of their muscles.
However, the downside is that the method is not as helpful for severe and long-standing anxiety disorders. This limitation also applies to the next concept for stimulating self-healing in anxiety disorders.
How to Influence Your Autonomic Nervous System with Biofeedback
Biofeedback aims to help individuals recognize and influence bodily reactions that occur unconsciously. This includes monitoring heart rate, blood pressure, sweating, or even brain waves. Measurements are conducted in hospitals, clinics, or through biofeedback devices that patients can take home. The measurement techniques vary widely. For example, sensors are attached to the body and connected to a computer. Patients can see how their bodies respond to stress on the screen, making the connection between feelings of anxiety and bodily reactions visually apparent. Using relaxation techniques, such as breathing exercises, they can learn to influence their bodies, such as lowering their pulse or preventing their blood pressure from spiking.
However, biofeedback requires a high level of motivation for body awareness and engagement with one’s own anxiety feelings. For many individuals suffering from anxiety disorders, this is not the suitable way to get rid of panic attacks. Why this is the case will be explained in the next section:
Why Behavioral or Psychotherapy is Not a Guide for Self-Help in Anxiety Disorders
Modern brain research has shown that the frequency and emotional intensity of negative or positive thoughts directly influence the structure and connectivity of our brain’s neurons. The complexity of this neuronal network is incredibly intricate, with approximately 86 billion neurons connected by about 100 trillion synapses. Each brain cell is linked to at least 1,000 other brain cells, constantly firing information that is either positively or negatively charged, depending on the associated emotions.
If you suffer from recurrent panic attacks, you might remember that your anxiety began gradually. You likely started avoiding anxiety-provoking situations more and more. With each panic attack, your fear of another uncontrollable anxiety episode grew stronger. The longer you suffer from panic attacks, the more deeply your brain has ingrained this anxious behavior. Eventually, the fear of fear becomes an entirely automated program, well-networked and firmly established in your brain.
Imagine what happens when you spend a lot of time in behavioral or psychotherapy talking about your fears or ruminating on their supposed causes. By constantly focusing on the anxiety, you strengthen the neuronal structures in your brain that fire negative impulses. The same applies to undergoing exposure therapy.
It’s similar to salt consumption. Most of us love salt as it adds flavor to food. Our taste buds become accustomed to the saltiness, prompting us to add more. Over time, we lose sensitivity to the subtle flavors in our food. If we then go on a fast, we realize afterward that we had been oversalting our food. We had become used to the increasing salt intake and reinforced it daily. Similarly, negative thoughts work the same way. Every engagement with anxiety displaces positive feelings until they disappear, leaving our thoughts saturated with constant negative impulses. Therefore, relaxation exercises or biofeedback, while calming, cannot interrupt unfavorable brain automata.
Anxiety can only be permanently eliminated where it originates—in the neuronal structures of your brain. This is where a new form of self-therapy comes in, gaining more advocates in recent years: the Bernhardt Method.
Before explaining how this method works, I want to briefly touch on the pharmacological treatment of anxiety disorders. Some might think a pill for anxiety attacks is the solution to all problems, as it avoids dealing with negative feelings. However, this is a poor idea, as you will soon see.
What Doctors Often Omit About Medication Treatment for Anxiety Disorders
In public perception, depression and anxiety disorders are often believed to result from a disturbed neurotransmitter balance in the brain. This involves the exchange of information between billions of neurons. When a neuron registers a stimulus, it sends out neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and norepinephrine, which allow neurons to communicate. Most doctors will tell you that these neurotransmitters must remain balanced to prevent disruptions in signal transmission, which could lead to depression or anxiety disorders.
Naturally, doctors will prescribe pills to address this imbalance, typically SSRI or SNRI pills. These are antidepressants and reuptake inhibitors of serotonin and norepinephrine, promoted for decades by the pharmaceutical industry as solutions to restore neurotransmitter balance. Unfortunately, this narrative is largely a marketing strategy, and many doctors do not disclose this. The shocking truth is that antidepressants are no more effective for anxiety disorders than placebos (sugar pills without any active ingredient).
The scandalous aspect is not only the enormous profit made from patients’ fears, but also the sad reality that these medications can cause significant side effects and have a high potential for dependency. Therefore, discontinuing these drugs frequently leads to considerable health problems. Thus, any medication treatment for anxiety disorders aimed at restoring chemical balance in the brain should be critically evaluated.
A truly successful anxiety therapy should instead help you understand what really happens in your brain during an anxiety disorder and provide you with tools to consciously change your self-perception and eliminate pathological anxiety. The Bernhardt Method is such a therapy. It is not only excellent for self-help but also avoids psychotropic drugs, thereby preventing unwanted side effects and high addiction potential.
Successfully combating anxiety disorders: Is the Bernhardt Method Suitable for Everyone?
I can unequivocally answer this question with a resounding yes, regardless of the form of anxiety disorder you suffer from. Whether it’s agoraphobia, panic attacks, generalized anxiety disorder, hypochondria, PTSD, or specific phobias such as emetophobia or social phobia, the Bernhardt Method has proven effective in thousands of cases.
If you have already made multiple unsuccessful attempts to escape your anxiety, it is understandable that you are very skeptical at this point. You might have been taking antidepressants or tranquilizers for years, undergone exposure or psychotherapy, or failed with various relaxation techniques. A therapy journal might not have helped you, and you might have contacted self-help organizations in your region. Perhaps you carry life cards with pictures and sayings meant to provide support in stressful situations, or you have Vomex tablets for nausea and dizziness or Tavor for unbearable anxiety in every pocket. In other words, you have tried almost everything to get rid of the fear and oppressive anxiety symptoms, but without success.
However, there is one thing you may not have tried yet: leveraging the neuroplasticity of your brain to reprogram your anxiety-conditioned brain. This involves not just the self-healing power of positive thoughts but a specific mental training that thousands of former anxiety patients have successfully completed.
The Bernhardt Method: 20 Minutes A Day to Make Your Life Anxiety-Free
If we continue with the comparison to a thought world salted by negative feelings, the question arises: How can you wean yourself off of this? Or do you even need to undergo a detox? I can assure you that nothing of the sort is necessary! On the contrary, you will love reintroducing the lost flavors of the positive emotional world into your life. But enough with the comparisons. Let’s move on to how you can permanently get rid of your anxiety attacks.
The Bernhardt Method is based on the latest findings in modern brain research. It focuses on using targeted mental training to restructure the neural connections in your brain so that your neurons start firing positive impulses. All you need are your five senses and 20 minutes a day for a program in which you positively reframe your thoughts. That’s all! You might be asking: How is that possible? Can I really lose my anxiety attacks just by doing this?
Since I am often asked this question, I have recorded a video that answers it simply and understandably. This is the first of 52 episodes in an online online therapy specifically developed for anxiety patients. You will be surprised at how simple and efficient self-help for anxiety and panic can be once you understand how to control the neural processes of anxiety in your brain.
By thinking differently, you activate different capacities in your brain. So far, you have spent a significant amount of your energy and time thinking about why everything in life has become so difficult due to your anxiety attacks and how to avoid them. If you were to use the same energy every day to find new ways to make life easier, you would start to feel better very quickly. This might sound too simple at the moment, but it can be scientifically explained: Your subconscious processes over 80,000 pieces of information per second. This is comparable to 80,000 helpers waiting every morning for your daily command.
As long as you continue to give them the task of finding everything that is wrong with your life, your 80,000 subconscious helpers will deliver exactly that: Every tiny symptom of anxiety disorders will be served to you on a silver platter, and the next anxiety attack will be given the red carpet treatment.
What do you think your life could look like if your brain instead subconsciously searched 80,000 times per second for ways to make your life freer from anxiety, easier, and more beautiful? Even if you can hardly imagine it, once you start down this path, it will take less than two weeks to see the first successes. And that is just the beginning of a journey that ends with a light and carefree life waiting for you.
Troy A.
Tampa, Florida