Overcome Anxiety with Excitement The Life-Changing Secret is to Lie, Cheat and Steal

Did you know that the physical experience of anxiety and stress - quickened heart rate, butterflies, inability to focus - is almost identical to the physical experience of excitement? Whenever you feel nervous, you can choose the emotion and instruct your mind about the feelings you are experiencing.

For a woman afraid of flying, she can just as easily convince her mind she's on a roller coaster or at a fun fair, and all of a sudden, the prospect of flying goes from being associated with death to being associated with childhood days spent at Disneyland. She still doesn't have control over what happens, but the terrifying pictures about losing that control are gone. That's why I often say that getting over phobias is as simple as the method I call lie, cheat, and steal.

Lie to your mind, cheat fear, and steal back the phenomenal confidence you were born with. 

Now, I know what you're thinking: This is too good to be true. How can someone who is terrified of flying simply flip the script—"I'm not in a flying coffin, I'm on a roller coaster ride!"—and reverse years of abject terror. It may sound far-fetched until you consider that these kinds of mind tricks surround us every day. You are doing them without even realizing it.

Take, for instance, a cheeseburger. Four people can have remarkably different feelings towards this cheeseburger, despite the fact that their bodies would have more or less the same reaction to it: to digest it.

1. Someone with an active eating disorder might feel abject fear at the prospect of eating a cheeseburger full of calories.

2. A vegetarian might feel indignant outrage at the ethics of eating an animal.

3. A Hindu might feel great sadness that a sacred being has been killed.

4. A hungry carnivore who hasn't eaten all day might feel excitement and joy.

The picture each of these people has constructed is drastically different, and that picture directly informs how they feel about it.

Another example is the well-documented placebo effect. If someone thinks their body is being given life-saving or curative medicine, their body will do some of the work of making the patient feel better, even if all they're being given is a sugar pill. This is not fantasy, but a well-documented effect that proves your brain has tremendous power that is dependent on what it believes.

Need another example? What about a needle: A heroin addict has no qualms about injecting a needle into their arm because they've associated it with something they desperately want and need. Meanwhile, many other people could hardly get a vaccine administered by a nurse, let alone do it themselves. The needle itself is agnostic to our feelings and has the same physical effect on all of us. Its power over us has to do with how we think about the needle.

The words and pictures we tell ourselves inform our reality

Numerous studies have shown that if teachers are told their students are "gifted," the way in which they teach those children changes, and thus the overall results of the classroom improve. Of course, the students don't have to be gifted, they can be a mix of average, below average and gifted. However, if teachers believe that the children are gifted, overall results for all the students will improve.

One influential study was conducted by psychologist Robert Rosenthal as early as the 1960s. America’s National Public Radio wrote about his seminal findings: "As Rosenthal did more research, he found that expectations affect teachers' moment-to-moment interactions with the children they teach in a thousand almost invisible ways. Teachers give the students that they expect to succeed, more time to answer questions, more specific feedback, and more approval: They consistently touch, nod and smile at those kids more."

Lie, Cheat, and Steal 

If you can lie to your brain about a cheeseburger, or a needle, or a sugar pill, you can do it with the more important things in your life too. I have provided more information in this article on How to deal with anxiety - the secret to phenomenal coping skills.

The main thing you need to really understand in order to lie, cheat, and steal your way to a happy mind and a happy you is this:

If you use the wrong words, you create the wrong reality.

Most people don't realize they have a choice in the matter because, as humans, we are unfortunately hard-wired to be attuned to what might go wrong. That is why it is easier to be negative than positive; once upon a time, we were more likely to survive if we were negative. Even today we could say strapping on a seat belt is negative because it means we are expecting to crash. However, the positive view is that the seat belt is making us more likely to survive. The very good news is we no longer need to be negative to survive. We can choose to be positive and choose to have a happier and more productive life.

This is not fantasy or meaningless positive thinking, it’s something that all the successful people I know have figured out...

Expect the best rather than the worst. 

We can actively counter our inclination to expect the worst, and choose to expect the best instead (or at least a more manageable version of what we're actually going through). Whether it's a layoff from work, an airplane ride, or an unexpected illness, you largely can't control the external forces that influence your life, but you can choose the beliefs, words, and mindset that you respond to these factors with. I talk about this more in 12 tips on how to heal depression.

Be in control of your mind, rather than letting your mind control you.

As anxiety and excitement are similar emotions, you can choose the meaning you attribute to those physical feelings. Having a choice empowers you to change the way you feel, by changing the way you think. When you understand and learn how to work with your mind, I believe that you can achieve anything. That is why I created Rapid Transformational Therapy™ (RTT™), to share simple yet effective techniques for everyone to achieve life-changing transformation.

In my free article Rules of the Mind, I reveal more about how the most powerful potential on the planet comes from your mind. Your mind is always listening to what you tell it, creating a blueprint that constructs your reality. The strongest force in you is that you must consistently act in ways that match your thinking, so use your imagination to give your mind more empowering and positive instructions, if you want more powerful and positive results.