By Benyamin Halpern

We all hear the buzzword “anxiety,” along with statistics like those stating that one out of three people will battle anxiety in their lifetime. What is anxiety? What causes it, and how does one overcome it? And what is the Torah’s prospective?

Almost every normal person will experience anxiety and/or its related conditions during their lifetime to some degree.

A third of the population will experience anxiety to the degree that it affects their daily living and productivity. Anxiety ranks as the number one diagnosis in emergency rooms across the United States,  and the primary medication used to treat anxiety is the most prescribed medication in America.

Anxiety has a few faces: Many complain of a feeling of agitation that sufferers describe as a black cloud over their heads at all times. Others experience a feeling if impending doom. Some common symptoms that accompany anxiety in general are intense inner nervousness and fear, tightness of throat, shortness of breath, dry mouth, heart palpitations, uncontrollable, obsessive scary thoughts, sleep problems, nausea, chest discomfort, dizziness, feeling of unreality, numbness or tingling in the extremities, hot flashes and chills, shortness of breath, and muscle tension.

Very commonly, the sufferer will avoid public places or situations that may evoke the feeling of anxiety, thereby making their world smaller and smaller. Another common form of anxiety is the experience of intrusive, persistent, irrational, thoughts or impulses. In an effort to minimize or cope with these nagging thoughts, the sufferer engages in repetitive behaviors and rituals to control their anxiety.

Anxiety is one of the most painful psychological conditions that one can experience, but fortunately also the most curable. The most effective way to treat anxiety today is CBT (Cognitive Behavioral Therapy),the science of systematically changingone’s thought patterns and behaviors to more positive ones that don’t produce anxiety. CBT has an 85-99 percent success rate, based on various studies done for different forms of anxiety. In other words, a sufferer from anxiety can look forward to at the least an 85percent reduction in symptoms and in many cases more relief from the debilitating effects that anxiety can have on the sufferer.

The Torah says in the third Parsha of Shema “Velo susuru achrei levavchem vechrei eineichem asher atem zonim achrayhem”– “You should not follow the distractions of your heart and eyes that you pull towards.” This posuk describes the yetzer harah’s tactics to keep us from staying on track with our life’s workin this world. The yetzer distracts us from the only thing we have any power to control or affect, and that’s our precious present moment.

One of the yetzer’s tactics is to create emotions of fear, causing us not for the future, or feelings of guilt that have us living in the past. Either way, we are living in fantasy, because we can only control the precious present moment, and we are not living in it. When the yetzer harah has us living in the past or future, it robs us from experiencing simcha and menuchas hanafesh in our lives. To avoid this pitfall, we need to learn how to stay in the present moment, and how to control our focus in order to stay on track and keep moving in the direction we to go. The skills to accomplish this can be learned rather quickly and, in most cases, within weeks.

Many successful interventions are based on the concept of modeling, since the brain is neutral it can be used for good or ill will. If you were to examine an x-ray of the brains of a rasha and a tzadik, you would find that they look the same. If you were to interview 10,000 anxiety sufferers, you would find that they all think in similar patterns; interviewing 10,000 people who don’t suffer from anxiety, would show that they too have common patterns. It is therefore possible to learn and model the way you need to think in the future to overcome your problem with anxiety.

 I would like to share some skills that you can put to work right away if you suffer from anxiety, and see rapid improvement. Most people just complain that they are unhappy with their current situation. I compare this to getting into a taxi, and when the driver asks where you want to go, you answer, “Not here!” You will then find yourself driving for hours while the meter is rolling, and still not be anywhere because you never gave him a clear destination. But it you have the address you’re headed to, the driver can get you there in a reasonable time.

Ask yourself, “If I got up tomorrow morning and my anxiety was gone, how would it be better?” You need to create clear images as to where you want to go. Come up with ten ways your life would be better; each one should be a clear picture of how you want life to be. For example, if one of your reasons is that you will be able to get up and enjoy the process of getting ready for the day, you need see, in your mind’s eye, a clear image of getting up tomorrow morning and feeling great. How does it feel? How do you like it? How does your face look? How are others responding?

The more real you see it, and the more of your five senses you can incorporate in your mental imagery, the quicker you will see the results and relief you are looking for. You will find that you will start moving toward the ten mental images you’ve created. Do this exercise daily; spending about one minute on each image. In just ten minutes a day, you will be giving your brain a clear message of where you want to go. Chazal say that every outcome lays in the intention that comes initially, so with this exercise you will be affecting the direction in which your mind is headed, thereby also setting the direction that your thoughts will follow throughout the day.

Benyamin Halpern, MSW LSW CSAC-T, has developed a Torah-based program that teaches the skills necessary to overcome anxiety. He sees clients in Lakewood, Monsey and Brooklyn, or via phone or Skype. For more information on the Staying on Track TM program to overcome anxiety call 732.730.3900, or email [email protected].