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Treating generalized anxiety disorder (GAD), despite being hard, can be successful. To be successful, though, you need to stick to a few simple guidelines. The first guideline you need to stick to is to surround yourself with recovery. This is probably a new idea for you, but don’t worry – in a moment I’ll explain what this concept involves, and you’ll see it’s not hard at all.

To understand this idea of surrounding yourself with recovery it’s vital that you first understand what is the opposite of this, and that’s the surrounding yourself with negativity bit. When you’re someone who surrounds yourself with negativity, you’ll typically spend a lot of time (online and offline) around people who have the same anxiety-related problems as you. You’ll also often read books and internet message boards that center on anxiety.

These things cause your mind to stay locked onto your anxiety disorder. Worse still, you’ll begin to feel the weight of other people’s anxiety problems as well, simply by spending time reading about or listening to their own stories of anxiety. This is “surrounding yourself with negativity,” and it can be extremely damaging. In some cases, it can completely stop your progress towards overcoming your anxiety related problems.

So now you know what the idea of surrounding yourself with negativity is all about, now you need to know what surrounding yourself with recovery is all about. Really, at its core, this is about avoiding everything I mentioned just now. So no more talking to other people who also have anxiety problems at the moment, no more visiting forums full of people who are suffering with anxiety, and no more books that are focused solely on living with anxiety.

If you do nothing but stop these fundamental things, the problem of surrounding yourself with negativity will quickly become history. But once you’ve achieved that, how do you go about surrounding yourself with recovery? Easy: you just do the opposite of what you’ve been doing up until now.

So rather than being around people who are suffering with anxiety and panic, hang around with people who suffered with anxiety in the past but found a way to beat it. Rather than hanging out at forums full of people with anxiety, hunt down forums that are full of people who had anxiety disorders but found a way past them.

Rather than studying books that focus on how to stop your anxiety, choose books that were written by people who genuinely lived with the problems themselves and found a way to overcome it. This fool proof approach will quickly lead you away from surrounding yourself with negativity and lead you towards surrounding yourself with recovery. Very quickly indeed you’ll be in much better mental shape.

People typically get what they think about and concentrate on, so putting all your resources into the people who were once where you are now but solved their problems has to be a sensible idea.

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