My Personal Story of Anxiety
My story is going to help you get the most out of my blog and the ideas I share here. When you learn how these ideas and techniques came about, it will make it much easier for you to use them and get fast results from them.
On a really basic level, my story is also going to show you why these ideas that helped me so much are also going to help you.
- You’ll see first-hand how terrible my anxiety had made my life
- You’ll see me hit rock bottom
- You’ll see me desperately hunt for the solutions I’ll share with you in this blog
- And you’ll see this stuff in action as it takes me from a place where I often couldn’t leave the house or even get out of bed to a place where I can lead the normal, panic-free life I dreamed of for 17 years
My Anxiety Roots
My anxiety was with me from the very beginning. As far back as my memory goes, it’s there with me. I can see it over me like a cloud in everything I look back on.
Back then I didn’t realise it was this thing called “anxiety.” I didn’t even realise I had any particular problem. I just thought it was the way I was.
Not being aware of your anxiety when it’s in its early stages is normal. Think back to your earliest anxiety-related memories and I bet that at the time you didn’t realise what it was or that it was anything unusual.
I bet you just thought it was the way you were.
But I’m sure there came a time for you, like there did with me, when you realised what your anxiety was and how it was truly affecting your life.
And from that point on, anytime you look back to the beginning of your anxiety, you’ll see it was always there.
The Calm Before The Storm
I was a shy child, a nervous child.
I didn’t like meeting new people, or doing anything with anyone outside my immediate family or my close circle of friends.
People labelled me as shy. They didn’t think twice when I would freak out and run and hide in a basement or a closet when I was faced with anything new or unsettling.
I was having a tantrum, they would say.
No, I was having a panic attack. But none of us knew what that was back then.
The people around me didn’t know I had an “anxiety” problem, or that my tantrums were panic attacks. But they knew I was delicate. They knew that I liked to keep myself to myself. They helped me to achieve that my not exposing me to anything that might freak me out.
They were careful and gentle around me, and that was fine with me.
I got into a routine that I could live with. I felt safe. It probably wasn’t very healthy, but it was safe.
Then all Hell broke loose.
High School Hell
When I was 11 years old I left my pleasant and quiet junior school and moved onto high school.
The junior school I’d left had been the only school I’d ever attended, and I’d felt very comfortable and safe there. It was small, friendly, and had a total of 151 students, including me.
And then came my new high school.
This new school was huge. More than 10 buildings, filled with over 1,500 students. It was a massive shock to my system.
For someone who had severe anxiety (although I didn’t know I did at the time), I got off to the worst possible start.
Even though around 25 other kids came from my old junior school with me to the new high school, none of them were placed in the same classes as me. Everyone else I was placed with all knew each other, so I was immediately the outcast.
Being the obvious class outcast, combined with the fact that I was very anxious and on edge all the time, made me a quick target with the bullies. Pretty soon my life was a living Hell.
I should also quickly point something out here.
I have an incurable eye disease that means I don’t see well at all. My sight was so bad, even back then when I was just 11 years old, that I would always have to sit right at the front of the class to be able to see the teacher and the board.
Some classes didn’t have desks close enough to the board, so the teachers would sometimes bring in little boxes for me to pull my chair up to at the front of the class.
This singled me out even more, and my eyesight and the related problems it caused me became a big part of what the bullies went after.
And that’s why I thought I should mention it here – it was a big part of my anxiety back then.
My eye problems would also play a huge part in the future, causing me all kinds of anxiety and panic.
But back on subject.
I was having a really tough time at the new high school. Even before this new school I was having occasional panic attacks, but once I started attending the new school things went downhill fast.
Panic attacks became common for me. I’d have panic attacks:
- Before bed because I feared school the next day
- During the night when nightmares would wake me
- In the mornings when my mum was trying to get me up for school
- While I walked to school (this happened so often that I had regular hiding spots on the journey to school so I’d have somewhere to I’d hide until the panic attack had passed)
By this stage, I was already missing a couple of days a week from school because of all these problems.
My mum was getting phone calls from the school and from Child Services, which was stressing her out in a big way, and which was making my own anxiety and panic worse.
Things went on like this for the first few months.
Halfway through my first year at the new school, I took another turn for the worse. On the days I was in school I started having attacks while I was in class.
Except I wouldn’t have them in the class. I would run out and hide in the bathroom, or sometimes I’d run all the way home.
Now I was getting into big trouble with the school.
No one knew that all these problems I was having in school were because of my anxiety. My teachers, my mum, Child Services…They all just thought I was a “problem kid” who didn’t want to go to school.
Even I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and I couldn’t explain it to anyone. In fact, I didn’t even try to explain it to anyone. I was so scared of what might be wrong with me I just avoided as much of it as I could.
I think I preferred to be thought of as just a “problem kid.”
Things continued this way for about a year. Missing school 2 or 3 days a week, sometimes storming out in the middle of classes when I was there, getting into trouble with my mum, teachers, the school.
But when I was 12, I sunk to another new low.
Increased Anxiety, Increased Isolation
Now I just stopped going to school almost entirely.
I’d go maybe 3 or 4 times a month.
People started coming to the house. Child services, social services, people from the school. I didn’t even know who half of them were.
But I spent every second of my life fearing someone would come.
Every time someone knocked on the door or the phone rang I’d freak out, crying, panicking, sometimes even vomiting.
My mum and my family were warning me that if I didn’t start going to school that I could be taken into care, or placed in a foster home for problem kids.
And you guessed it – it all just heaped more anxiety into my life.
As kind of a last-ditch effort my mum and my school decided maybe I should try a different school.
That went great.
On the day the headmaster was showing my mum and me around the potential new school, I had a panic attack and ran away. No one could find me for 6 hours.
I think it was at this stage that everyone knew there was a bigger problem than me not wanting to go to school.
I was still supposed to be attending my original high school at this stage, but around this time everyone (the school, the people from Child Services, and even my mum) just kind of let things slide.
The school stopped calling when I didn’t turn up, and Child Services seemed to disappear too.
And that’s how things stayed for about 2 years.
I literally just stayed home from school for 2 years on my own (my mum worked and my brothers and sister were much older and had already left home, so I had the house to myself).
To this day, I still don’t know why my school and Child Services dropped my case and their threats and just let me get away with never going to school.
I have no idea why that happened, but I was so grateful that it had.
I think if I’d been forced to go to school for those 2 years I might not have made it through.
I dread to think what would have happened to me.
So for two years, nothing. My panic attacks and severe anxiety continued, but at least I wasn’t having to face school.
And then, out of the blue, I got a letter from a special school.
It was a place that’s normally reserved for serious problem kids. Kids who’ve been expelled from every school in the city and were refused to be taken by anyone else.
Those kinds of kids.
This special school did one-on-one teaching (one kid, one teacher, nothing else), and that’s what they were offering me.
Actually, they weren’t offering, they were instructing.
They’d suddenly woken up to the fact that it was illegal for me to not be attending school below the age of 16. They gave me a schedule of 2 hours a day, 2 days a week
It was just me and my teacher. No other kids. No other people.
I handled that much better than my normal school. If I had an attack and stormed out, my one-on-one teacher was far more understanding, and she was good to me in general.
At this stage, I’d still not been “diagnosed” as having an anxiety disorder, but I think this one-on-one teacher was the first person who understood my problem on a deeper level.
I continued being “taught” by this teacher for 2 years, until I was 16.
Once you reach the age of 16 in England there’s no legal requirement for you to go to school, so that pretty much ended my formal education right there.
I’m ashamed to say I have no qualifications at all. I was eligible for my final exams because of the one-on-one schooling I’d had for the previous two years, but I couldn’t face a hall of 300 kids taking exams, so I never took them.
Slow And Steady Decline
Over the next two years I continued to get worse.
I had severe health anxiety. Every day I thought I was dying. Every physical symptom I developed sent me into a frenzy because I thought it was a sign of a terrible disease or illness.
I had agoraphobia. I started going for months at a time without leaving the house. My record was 6 months.
I had extreme social anxiety disorder. It was virtually impossible for me to be around anyone but my immediate family. Even the thought of encountering anybody new triggered panic attacks.
I had obsessive-compulsive disorder. This caused me dozens of ridiculous problems. At its worst, I used to have to sleep on the kitchen floor because no matter how often I checked it, I always thought I’d left the oven on and that it would burn down the house.
A quick timeout here: The reason I’m telling you this about my past is because I want you to know that whatever your own situation is right now, I’ve been there. You can see how extreme my problems have been. I’m not someone who’s claiming to have had some “anxiety problems” to give myself credibility. This was my life for 17 years. I want you to know that these problems can be beaten. My life is a perfect example.
At this point in my story I was about 18 or 19 years old.
My problems with anxiety leveled off around that time. I didn’t get any better and I didn’t get any worse. But I would have good and bad periods.
Some days I’d be okay and I could leave the house and do a few normal things. Other days I’d be terrible and find leaving the house or doing anything much at all was impossible.
From time to time the bad days would turn into bad weeks and bad months. This would be when I’d have those 6 month stretches where I couldn’t even leave the house.
But I just survived around these times.
I lost a lot of friends during those long spells where I locked myself away.
At the time, I was so preoccupied with just surviving the bad times that I didn’t even care. But when things cleared up and my friends weren’t around anymore, it hit me hard.
These good and bad spells were my way of life for the next few years.
Rock Bottom
I’ve had 2 rock bottom experiences in my life. The first one happened when I was 26 years old.
For 5 or 6 years before that I’d been “surviving” my anxiety. Making the most of any good spells I had, battling through the bad spells.
But then when I was 26 it happened. Nothing in particular caused it. It just happened.
The first thing I noticed was my sleep.
My sleep was always directly linked to my anxiety. When my anxiety was at its worst, my sleep was at its worst. When my anxiety improved, my sleep improved.
I started sleeping less and less. It got steadily worse over time until eventually I had a week where I’d had just one hour of sleep in 7 days. During that same week, my 1 or 2 panic attacks a day that I’d gotten used to had also increased.
Now I was having 10 or 15 huge attacks every single day.
And I’m talking huge attacks. The kind that would leave me half unconscious on the floor afterwards for an hour, crying, shaking, too weak to do anything.
I couldn’t eat. Anything I ate I threw straight back up.
Not eating and not sleeping and having so many panic attacks each day took its toll on my body. I was a physical wreck.
I was finding it hard just walking around the house because I was so dizzy it was hard staying on my feet.
My family saw what I was becoming and tried to get me to go to the doctor, but I refused and freaked out when they tried to force me.
I was so sure I was losing my mind. I thought if I saw a doctor they would put me in a mental asylum.
My family gave up on getting me to the doctor and did the next best thing. They arranged a phone appointment with my doctor.
The doctor called me and we talked about my problems for about 20 minutes. She prescribed me 14 days of sleeping pills and Valium to get me over this “unpleasant spell,” as she called it.
The combination of the sleeping pills and the Valium worked well in the short term, and it did help me past the “unpleasant spell.”
For the first time in weeks I was getting 4 or 5 hours of sleep each night (I hadn’t slept longer than 2 or 3 hours a night for years prior to this, so this felt miraculous), and the Valium was controlling some of the panic attacks.
I was still having 2 or 3 attacks a day, but that was bearable, whereas the 10 or 15 a day were not.
My doctor didn’t want to prescribe me either the sleeping pills or the Valium for longer than 2 weeks, because both of them form dependencies, and I didn’t particularly want to stay on them any longer either.
So after 2 weeks, the pills ran out.
I was terrified.
I felt like my choice was either to have my entire life ruined by panic and anxiety, or to take so many medications that the panic stopped but I was too “out of it” to care.
Just a few days later, after stopping the medications, the panic attacks started creeping back.
Another phone appointment with my doctor.
She still didn’t want to put me on any more pills, so she referred me to a psychologist who specialized in anxiety disorders.
She may as well have asked me to go into a room filled with tigers.
Psychologists and psychiatrists had always freaked me out. The thought of going to one seemed as bad to me as the anxiety did. But I was desperate and I went.
It was about what I expected.
Some standard stuff: talking about my childhood, talking about my anxieties, talking about my family.
Some weird stuff: talking to my dead father who I was told to pretend was in the chair beside me, talking to each of my family members like they were there with me when they weren’t.
I saw the psychologist for a couple of months, but it was doing absolutely nothing for me. My biggest anxiety in life had become my sessions with her, and it’s not like my time there was achieving anything.
So I stopped.
I was back to where I’d been not long before. And without the sedative-type drugs the frequency of my panic attacks crept back up until I was at more than 10 a day again.
Except this time I didn’t do anything about it.
- No visits to my doctor
- No phone calls to my doctor
- No medication to fall back on
- No crazy psychologists
It was just me and my anxiety. And like I always had throughout my life, I learned to cope with it.
I found a way to make the 10 or 15 unbearable panic attacks a day into 10 or 15 bearable panic attacks a day.
“I couldn’t beat it,” I thought, “so I’ll find ways to live with it.”
And I’ve noticed that’s what a lot of people like you and me do. We see no way out, no solution, so all we can do is find ways to cope.
And that’s what I did.
Losing My Life To Anxiety
I learned to cope, but my anxiety and all the problems it was causing me were getting worse by the day. Over the next couple of years, life got truly horrific for me in many ways.
I was still having constant panic attacks, 10 or 15 a day, guaranteed.
But on top of that, my anxiety was making every area of my life worse.
My agoraphobia, health anxiety, social anxiety, and OCD were dominating and ruining my life. I constantly thought I was dying, and I lived in permanent fear at the thought of having to leave the house or speak to anyone.
This is what learning to cope does for you.
Coping doesn’t solve any problems, and it doesn’t even slow down their progression. It’s just denial while your life spirals out of control and into a Hell most people can’t even imagine.
And you know this. You could tell me the same stories about your own life, I’m sure.
Because this is how it gets when anxiety dominates your life.
This is how bad it can get.
Things got so bad that I went back to my doctor again. And again, it was on the phone.
Despite my doctor not really getting my situation or my problems, I really have to give her credit for allowing me to have consultations over the phone.
She knew my anxiety made it hard for me to go to her office, and I’m very grateful that she was kind enough to talk to me on the phone)
She prescribed some more sleeping pills for me, because once again I’d slipped into a mess where I was only getting one or two hours of sleep a night at the most.
But this time my doctor did something different. She also prescribed me an anti-depressant.
The pills were called Anafranil.
It’s an older and less common anti-depressant, which my doctor thought would be good because it’s less habit-forming than modern anti-depressants, and she also thought it would help my OCD, which was getting out of control.
For all of my adult life I’d been terrified of taking anti-depressants. I’m not sure why that was. Maybe the stigma. Maybe the stories that people get hooked on them. Maybe that you hear people say they became completely numb to life once they took them.
I’m not sure why. But I’d always been terrified.
A strange thing happened, though. As soon as she prescribed the Anafranil and I had the box of pills in my hands, I felt huge relief.
“This is the thing,” I thought. “This is the answer I’ve been looking for. I’ve finally found my cure.”
I took my first Anafranil pill about 30 minutes before I went to bed, as my doctor had advised.
I didn’t expect to feel any better right away, because my doctor had told me that all anti-depressants can take many weeks to change the way you feel. But she’d also told me that this particular medication should help me to sleep even from the first night.
An hour later, as I lay in bed trying to sleep, one of the most terrifying nights of my life began.
I started hallucinating.
First of all it was internal images – anytime I would shut my eyes I would see terrible things in my imagination. Horrific images of violence and pain. These thoughts and images weren’t my own. They just randomly appeared in my mind, and having no control over them scared the crap out of me.
Every time I closed my eyes and saw these images I’d have a mini panic attack and I would have to get up and put the light on.
This went on until about 3 in the morning.
And then it got worse.
Because then these images and thoughts became real to me – genuine hallucinations. I was seeing things in my bedroom that weren’t there.
Ghosts, masked men, hallucinations of me hurting people I loved and of them hurting me.
It was the worst experience of my life.
And it lasted until morning. Eight hours of Hell and not a minute’s sleep.
I got an emergency appointment with my doctor on the phone. I told her about my reaction to the Anafranil and she said that, although it was unusual to have such a strong negative reaction, Anafranil did occasionally cause hallucinations and unpleasant thoughts and images.
She told me to stop taking the Anafranil right away and she prescribed me another medication.
This time it was Prozac, one of the many forms of SSRI anti-depressants, and a much more common medication prescribed to people with anxiety.
Again, I took one just before bedtime. An hour later I was throwing up, and I spent the rest of night, again with no sleep, feeling unbearably sick.
No hallucinations, but lots of sickness.
My doctor had warned me of these side-effects, and she’d told me that unless they were severe to try persevering long enough for them to pass. So I stuck with the Prozac for 4 days.
That was as long as I could bear.
Every time I took one it made me throw up an hour later, and I would feel horribly sick for the whole day. Just as the sickness was fading I would have to take another pill, and it just felt like I was poisoning my body.
Another phone call to my doctor.
She told me not to worry about having negative reactions to two medications. This was normal, she said, and it just takes a bit of time to find a medication that agrees with someone.
I was asking myself what my life had become.
Too mentally and physically sick to get through the days naturally, and now taking all the drugs under the sun like some kind of guinea pig to find one that “numbed” me just right.
My doctor prescribed another SSRI. Celexa.
I took it, like I had the others. And this was the first of these medications that didn’t have an instant unpleasant effect on me. No throwing up, no nausea, no hallucinations.
Just tiredness.
An hour after taking my first Celexa pill I fell asleep for 3 hours. This was in the afternoon, and I didn’t even have a memory of lying down.
That’s how it was for the first couple of weeks. Every time I took a pill, I’d be asleep within an hour or so. And I’d wake up feeling groggy and dazed and stay that way for the rest of the day.
But it was better than the nausea and the hallucinations, so I stuck with it.
Actually, I stuck with it for 9 months.
And during those 9 months, my anxiety didn’t improve one bit. My doctor kept reminding me that anti-depressants can take many weeks to take effect, so every day I was wondering if it would be the day I would start to feel better.
But that day never came.
And I had some really unpleasant side-effects from the Celexa, even after months of taking them (when most side-effects should have disappeared).
- I was tired all the time, and yet I wasn’t sleeping at night
- I had trembling in my hands and arms, sometimes severe
- I had tingling and numbness in my hands and feet
- I was experiencing depersonalisation much more often
- And I was also suffering the many dreaded sexual side-effects that SSRIs are famous for
All those unpleasant side-effects, and they were all for nothing because the anxiety wasn’t improved at all.
In fact, my anxiety was worse because I was terrified of the side-effects, and already fearing trying to stop taking the Celexa, which I knew might cause problems.
That’s how things stayed for the 9 months I was taking the Celexa.
I was how I’d always been: suffering huge anxiety and multiple panic attacks every day of my life. Except now I was also stuck on anti-depressants that were doing me no good at all.
Then I hit rock bottom for the second time.
And it started just like it did the first time I’d hit rock bottom.
I started sleeping less and less. I was only getting a few hours of sleep a night to begin with, but over the course of just 2 or 3 weeks, I sunk to where I was only sleeping for an hour or two each night.
Then my panic attacks increased in severity. I’d been having more than 10 attacks a day for a long time already, but now they got unbearably severe, even by my own standards.
I was right back where I’d been a year before.
But now I was in an even worse situation, because I’d tried everything my doctor had told me to do and had still not recovered.
I’d taken the sedatives, I’d taken the sleeping pills, I’d taken the 3 anti-depressants, I’d seen a psychologist.
And after all that I was right back where I started. Constant panic attacks, unable to leave the house, living in constant fear, terrified of living, terrified of dying.
The End of Panic
In the early hours of a Monday morning in September, 2005, just a few days after my 27th birthday, I made a decision that changed my life forever.
Throughout the previous night I’d had the worst panic attack of my life.
It lasted for hours.
I was used to my panic attacks lasting for 5 or 10 minutes, or sometimes even as long as half an hour in extreme cases.
But this one had lasted for hours.
Nothing I did would make it stop. Looking back on it, I can’t even believe it happened that way.
I was literally crying and hysterical for hours.
During that mother of all panic attacks I’d been in the shower, in my bed, under my bed, in the garage, in the backyard, in the attic.
But there was nowhere I could go and nothing I could do to make it stop.
I couldn’t escape it.
In the end, I think it stopped simply because my body was too exhausted to fuel the panic. During the previous night I’d thrown up more times than I could count, cried for hours, and been shaking violently throughout the whole thing.
My body was wrecked. Too weak to do anything.
And it was the morning after all this had happened that I made the decision that I mentioned just now – the one that I said changed my life forever.
It was while I was curled up into a ball in the corner of my bedroom floor that I made the decision. And that decision, simply, was this:
- I’m gonna beat this. I’m gonna stop living like this. And I’m gonna do it on my own
I was terrified and exhausted, and to use a cliché, I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I knew it had to end. I couldn’t go on living that way any longer.
It was killing me.
I knew that my life was going to become a series of rock bottoms, each one more terrible than the last, and I just couldn’t live knowing that was my future.
So I made my decision.
I didn’t know exactly what I was going to do to beat my panic and anxiety, but I knew that I’d taken the first step by deciding I would find a way to beat it.
That reminds me of something else I’ve discovered about anxiety, and about the human mind in general.
When we set ourselves goals, or we ask ourselves a new question, our mind starts looking for answers. It does this even when we’re not aware of it, and it can lead to breakthroughs that would never have been made had we not first set a goal or asked a new question.
I’ve got a perfect example of this.
Within a few minutes of making the decision to beat my anxiety, and to do it alone, my mind had already set itself the task of finding answers for me. This wasn’t something I was consciously doing. My mind was working on its own to solve the problem I’d set it.
Moments later my mind had given me my first instruction.
That instruction was to drag myself up off the floor, to go to my computer, to go to Amazon, and to find as many books as possible that had the potential to help me.
And I did just that.
At the time, I didn’t really have a clear idea of what I was doing, or why I was doing it. But looking back, I see what was going on.
For years I’d been using every normal anxiety resource I could get my hands on to overcome my problems. I’d read books on anxiety, I’d taken medication, I’d seen a psychologist, I’d tried taking anti-anxiety courses.
None of them had done me any good at all.
But all those approaches had been other people’s ideas of what I needed:
- I was following advice from a doctor who had never had an anxiety disorder
- I was reading books written by people with fancy-sounding letters after their names who had never had an anxiety disorder
- I was having sessions with a psychologist whose only experience with anxiety disorders came from text books
None of these people knew what I needed. None of them knew firsthand what anxiety was – not the way you and I know it.
So when I made that decision in 2005 to beat my anxiety my way, what I’d really decided to do was teach myself everything there was to know about anxiety, panic, psychology, relaxation, fear, emotions, and anything else that I thought might be playing some part in my anxiety-related problems.
Looking back, I realise that my thinking was this: If I could learn absolutely everything there was to know on all these subjects, then I could take the very best ideas (the ones that worked for people like you and me), and forget all the nonsense other people were shovelling at me.
Sitting at my computer that morning, after dragging myself up off the floor, there was only 1 thought going through my mind: I don’t want to live in fear anymore.
So that’s where I started.
I typed the word “fear” into the Amazon search box and I ordered the first 5 books I could find on the subject of fear.
I didn’t know if these books were right for me, or even if they’d help. I just knew that I wanted to stop the fear, and that perhaps learning everything I could about it would help me to achieve that.
A few days later and my books on fear arrived.
I speeded through the books. I was inspired by the thought that I was beginning a new approach to beating my anxiety. I had hope again for the first time in years.
It was the 4th of the four books that I read on fear that gave me my first massive breakthrough. It was a book called “The Gift of Fear,” written by a man called Gavin DeBecker.
The crazy thing is, it’s a book about how to avoid violent and dangerous situations (its target audience seems to be women who are in violent relationships or who fear being attacked by a stranger), so at first glance it’s not a book that would seem useful to someone with anxiety.
But it was such a great book, and it explained fear in such a wonderfully simple and refreshing way, that it had a huge impact on me.
The last chapter, in particular, had a profound effect on me.
“The Gift of Fear” turned out to be the very first step in my journey to where I am now. It proved to me, beyond a doubt, that there was knowledge, information, and ideas out there that could help people like you and me that was being overlooked or ignored.
And it showed me something else too. Something very important:
- The solutions to panic and anxiety are not obvious and are not where you would expect to find them
When we have a problem with anxiety, we go to our doctor, we go to a psychologist or psychiatrist, we read books on anxiety and panic disorders.
But those places aren’t where the answers are found. If they were, none of us would have any problems, because we would have found our answers the moment we started looking for them.
I realised this after I read “The Gift of Fear.” I realised I needed to be looking beyond the traditional books, courses, doctors, and guides.
As soon as I had this realisation, I started seeing techniques and tools in all areas of life that I could apply to my anxiety.
I was finding things in sports psychology, mindfulness meditation practices, business training, parenting books, and a whole host of other places where you’d never dream of finding help for anxiety.
It was astonishing to me.
For so long I’d been devouring everything I could find on the subject of anxiety, and all the time the answers had been everywhere but the area of anxiety.
I started applying all that I was learning to my life. And I got immediate results. I just couldn’t believe it.
I’d finally found things that worked.
I was so excited by what I was discovering that I started sharing the ideas I was developing with other people with severe anxiety. In the beginning, I did this through a couple of little online forums.
Almost immediately I was getting positive feedback.
The people I was sharing these ideas with were getting results, just like I was.
People who had lived with anxiety for years and had tried everything to overcome it were telling me that they were finally seeing positive changes in their lives.
It was the most exciting time of my life.
Not only were my own anxiety-related problems disappearing before my very eyes, but so were everyone else’s.
Hearing so many positive stories from people got addictive, and I wanted to reach more people who had the same problems I’d had for so long.
That’s when I started this website that you’re visiting right now, although it was very different back then and nothing like the blog it is today.
At the time, I didn’t know a thing about building websites, or making videos, or creating digital books. But I knew that it was the only way for me to reach huge numbers of people.
After a lot of trial and error, I had my website up and running, and I also had my free online course “Beat Panic Today” launched.
Over the following 12 months, literally thousands of people used “Beat Panic Today.” Some days I would get as many as 50 emails from people saying how the ideas in the free course had changed their lives.
It was incredible.
Over the past few years, I’ve refined my “Beat Panic Today” video course many times, and it’s still available free to anyone who needs it. Click on the image or the link below to access “Beat Panic Today.”
Click Here To Get Beat Panic Today For Free
The only negative comments I received about Beat Panic Today were from people who wanted more of the same, or from people who loved the ideas but wanted a very specific, step-by-step plan to follow.
And that was the inspiration for my Instant Panic Relief Program.
As soon as it became clear to me that people wanted a simple and complete program to overcome their anxiety for good, I immediately got to work.
I wanted to put together all the very best techniques I’d discovered and created during the years I was looking for my own anxiety solution, and I wanted to make sure it was quick and easy to use, and would guarantee results for anyone who used it.
After more than a year of hard work I had the Instant Panic Relief program ready to go.
The program contains every single technique I used to beat the anxiety that had dominated my life for 17 years.
And these same techniques are the ones I still use every day of my life to make sure the anxiety and panic stay gone for good.
If you want to check out the Instant Panic Relief program, you can visit the link below, or just click on the image here:
On that page, I’ll talk you through every part of the program and show you if it’s right for you.
You’ll also get to watch lots of videos from people just like you and me who’ve used Instant Panic Relief to end their problems with panic and anxiety.
