It is a fact that mind and body are connected in every way.  The body knows what the mind feels even before we consciously allow it to be known/felt, before we can assign meaning to it to understand.  We know when we are doing what is right for ourselves, for our minds, for our bodies and we know when we need to do better.  What we know will express through the body even if we don’t allow it to be consciously said.  With that logic, the anxiety we feel often stems from underlying patterns we know don’t serve us that we continue anyway, going against what we know is right for us.  We need to claim responsibility for our lives and reducing anxiety.  I’ve fought anxiety for the great majority of my life and I never wanted to admit my role in it.  It felt like something that just settled on me that I needed to carry.  There are certain facets of it from a chemical stand point that we don’t have control over, but we do have control over mitigating how the body handles these things and our reaction to it. 

Anxiety is sometimes our mind/body on alert for what we innately know and perhaps don’t want to admit.  It’s the expression of the body’s innate system and intuitive connection—an intricate, subconscious knowing.  Do I pretend that this is the ultimate answer and the cause of all anxiety?  Absolutely not.  But do I believe in the validity of self-fulfilling prophecy and the mind’s ability to ignore the reality of what we do?  Absolutely.  Bishoi Khella shared an amazing reel about his initial steps into health and wellness, talking about the day he smoked back to back cigarettes and chugged coffee and he physically felt like he was having a heart attack.  He was already in an unhealthy state with bad habits and had feared something like his health taking a turn in that direction.  So why did he keep doing the things he knew put him at risk for that very thing happening?   He proposed the idea that when we know deep down what we are doing is wrong, the body can manifest it—or something like it.  Like, being sedentary and eating poorly and we start fearing a heart attack and then we smoke those back to back cigarettes and drink the coffee and suddenly we feel like we are having a heart attack. 

While we don’t often look at those scenarios as manifesting, that is, in essence, what’s happening.  No, manifesting isn’t all sunshine and rainbows and flower crowns, worshipping the moon.  The mind is powerful enough to conjure up some of that negative stuff too.  So yes, it is very likely that we can bring our worst fears to fruition…even if it’s the image or shadow of those fears and we create anxiety around it…so our anxiety feels like a heart attack when we do the things we fear will cause a heart attack.  It’s like we know we’re unhealthy and that those habits would be the end of us so we have some sort of physical manifestation of what we fear.  The idea instantly made sense to me.  My journey dealing with anxiety wasn’t so straightforward as connecting those pieces and I’m still learning about it daily.  But something became very clear with this concept from Bish: We end anxiety when we take steps to get our lives back—when we live.  Basically, taking action in the right direction eases anxiety because we are empowering ourselves to find a solution.  While we may know that on a subconscious level, this is the most visceral way I can explain it because we feel the ease of that chokehold when we do what we need to do.  So take our lives back one step at a time and start listening to what we already know. Going against that intuition is like playing Russian roulette each time we do the very thing we know will cause us harm—it may not get us every time but it will eventually so the body warns us.  We create these scenarios and we can resolve them just as easily by admitting what the body already knows.