Anxiety is no different to most things that are persistent, there is a formula or as I am calling it a recipe for anxiety. And, like every other recipe in the world, if you do this you will get that outcome. There is a straightforward correlation. Do this and that will happen. You might want to cook a nice meal and so you follow the recipe willingly, with anxiety you are unconsciously doing it but you are still following the recipe, hence the outcome of anxiety. This video explains the recipe for you. And, let's be clear the recipe is the roadmap to the outcome. Once you know the recipe you can change the outcome. This is real power over anxiety. You can become a master chef.

The Recipe of Anxiety Video is Here

Emotional power and control, the unseen force. 

I cannot emphasis too strongly the importance of understanding the role power and control plays in every aspect of your life. Particularly, if things are not quite going how you want them to. 

The basic principle is very easy to grasp but hard to believe. You have all the power and control you need to manage every life eventuality. The trouble is you don't know about power and control so you give yours away automatically then blame external circumstances for not having it anymore.

Eg. My job makes me stressed.

She/he makes me so angry.

I cannot because I am anxious.

I cannot because I might panic.

I cannot because I am depressed.

These are all simple examples, we all are prone to, of giving away our power and control and then blaming something else for not feeling in control.

Watch the video for a lot more detail.

All mental health problems arise from experiencing the wrong emotion at the wrong time. This is not to blame emotions, they are fundamental to every aspect of your life. But the wrong emotion in any circumstance is going to give you the wrong reaction. For example, laying in bed and experiencing the extreme fear reaction of panic. Having a lovely holiday with your family and experiencing sadness. Walking to work and feeling anxiety, or going for a night out and feeling shame. These are all legitimate emotions but they are wrong in the context. The emotion tells you how to feel but it is the wrong feeling for the context. If you want to rectify this and feel more of the right emotions in the right circumstances then we need to work to retrain your brain. Basically this means teaching your brain that it is getting things wrong and showing it what the right emotions is in any particular setting.

But...I show you how to change it from the outside in.

From time to time we can all get stuck in an emotion and lose perspective on that emotion. But when the emotion gets stuck and therefore the feeling persists for a long time or it is really horrible then we need to understand why this is happening. There is always a strong desire 'not feel this way' but that alone will do nothing other than deepen the horrible feeling.

It is really fundamental to recognize that you cannot change an emotion from inside of it but you can change it when you step out of it's pull and recognise the truth of your reality. 

This video explains it in more detail.

It is the beginning of the COP 26 conference, and the attempt by global leaders to save the planet for future generations. Many of us will not be here to see all the outcomes of their efforts. Why not think about saving ourselves now. Because we matter. You matter. Why not think about editing your life to give you more of what you want and less of what you don't want. Make the remainder of your life happy and fun. Do what you want to be who you want to be. This is lifestyle design. In this video I describe the 5 main principles for editing mental health problems out of your life. These are:-

1) Don't accept the status quo; if it is not giving you what you want from life then challenge it. We make the assumption that the life we have is the life we 'should' have. This is not the case. There are many small adjustments we can make that give us huge improvements. When you change the direction you are travelling you always end up in a different place. This is conscious lifestyle...

When I have an awareness campaign running on Facebook, I often read the comment 'why is Anxiety Wizard not free?' I was puzzled by this for a long time. Anxiety Wizard took two years and about 600 hours to build. Why would someone expect it to be free? If it was a published book no one would expect it to be free. Then I realized that it was probably not the question. Maybe it is a bit like 'How are you'? Not a question, really more a greeting. No one really expects a true answer. 

I wondered if the real question was; how can I trust this will help me? How can I trust he knows what he is talking about? How can I trust myself to get the most out of it? How can I trust I will use it? Can a mental health problem really be solved without a therapist of a medication? Doubt and uncertainty coalesce into inaction. Which means that nothing gets done, changed, engaged with. There is no progress. The sad thing is that doubt and uncertainty are likely to be elements of the problems you...

It is the week after the A Level results came out (2021) and it got me wondering about why the most important topics there are (in my opinion) are completely neglected, with catastrophic consequences for many millions of people.

School teaches nothing useful about mental health and how to manage it with the result that about 16% of the UK population end up on an antidepressant with horrible consequences. 

I understand that there are many thousands of people working to help those with mental health problems, I am one of them, but they are fighting a losing battle if the basics are not taught in school. In this video I outline what I consider to be the three basic facts that need to be taught (and learnt) but are not.

I first made this video a few years ago when I was renting an office in a building that had a small toilet for men. I observed the toilet behaviour of the men on my floor and I realized that something was odd (not me I assure you) so I did some research and I found it quite fascinating. This led me to make this video.  

The video reveals why understanding your personal psychological space is as important as knowing the boundaries of your personal physical space. Every anxiety problem and every depression problem stems, in part from a lack of understanding of the force that your personal psychological space exerts over you. When you identify your personal psychological space, which I have named The Personal Membrane' you will have taken a huge step in owning, managing and defeating its destructive power over you. Depression and anxiety are lessened when you can fully understand why they occurred in the first place. View this video and let's get on this path of discovery and...

This is a longish video but then what I am describing is so profoundly important, if you want to be rid of panic, anxiety, depression or stress, that sometimes  things just take a bit of time to explain.

If you take a moment and consider the disconnect between your experience of what you feel/believe and what external reality tells/shows you then you have seen the disconnect between internal reality and external reality first hand. 

I see this every day in my clinical practice. People say they have no 'real' reason to be anxious or depressed, and yet they are. In this video I explain how this disconnect happens and what its' implications are for you. 

I call it learning to crack the code, and there is a simple truth behind this. Learning what the code is and then learning how to crack it is so powerful and so obvious that taking back control of your mental health can even be fun.

If you can see the logic and simplicity of what I describe then you are in a position to...

Feeling overwhelmed or submerged in struggle can hit you from the most unexpected places. And when it does emotional pain has the effect of dragging you closer and closer to it. You can feel you are swimming in a pool of distress. Indeed, every psychological problem, whether it be panic, anxiety, depression or stress has the quality of immersing you in distressing emotion. Technically it is called interoception and it is a significant facet of all areas of our conscious and unconscious life. It is the process by which the nervous system senses, interprets, and integrates signals originating from within the body. It is that part of you that pays attention to things, mapping the moment by moment internal landscape of your experience. And depending upon how you cognitively interpret that experience gives you the label of panic, anxiety, depression or stress. Which you can then use to understand why you feel the way you do, even though it is a rather circular interpretation. It does not...