Relax and Sleep
Helping You Get the Sleep You Need
Anxiety Cure
Mental Imagery Can Be a Great Help to Treat Insomnia
An anxiety cure comes with the knowledge of mental imagery, and the way it works, to help us deal with worry. The chronic worrier indulges in painful, unpleasant mental images. He is forever holding before his mind the pictures of what he doesn't want to happen.
The creative thinker goes through the same motions as the worrier, but he holds before his mind pictures of things that he wants to accomplish, what he does want to happen.
Mental Imagery
Mathew Chappell says that the practice of substituting pleasant mental pictures for unpleasant ones is the best anxiety cure that psychology has yet discovered for combating worry.
Dr. Chappell points out that this technique of substituting pleasant images for unpleasant ones does far more than furnish an escape for the mind. It also reduces excess emotion, as well as excess effort, both of which are component parts of worry.
He says that if you attempt to use willpower against your worries you only worry more, for your additional effort increases the emotional tone.
The Power Of Mental Images
Instead, you should make no effort whatsoever to fight worry. Relax from trying. For a period of several weeks, make it a practice to draw yourself up short whenever you start to worry, and realize that you are picturing unpleasant mental images. When you do realize this, then deliberately begin to picture pleasant mental images.
Winning The Bike Race
Dr. Chappell recommends you do not wait until you are worrying to decide upon a pleasant mental picture as a cure. Decide on one in advance so that you will have it ready for use in emergencies. Remember some pleasant incident in your childhood that you can call up when needed - a picnic, the day you won the race at school, your first dance, a fishing trip - anything at all that has pleasant associations.
After you practice this for several weeks you break the worry habit.
Don't resist your unpleasant mental images with will power.
Don't bother with them at all. Just leave them alone and focus your attention deliberately upon some pleasant memory.
Another famous psychologist, David Seabury, recommends the same technique as one of the best ways to overcome neurotic anxiety. Every time you are in a situation that tempts you to worry, he says, substitute positive, wholesome images instead, and in time the very situation that acted as a trigger on your anxiety will become a conditioned stimulus for calm, collected, creative thought. The great thing abut this anxiety cure is that you can use it whenever you like, wherever you are.
Heal Anxiety and Depression.com offers FREE information and resources that will empower you to heal your life without medication and in a natural way. Finding the anxiety cure that works best for you is a big step towards getting a good nights sleep.
What mental imagery works for you?
Do you have one or more mental images that will help you unwind?
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Mental Imagery to Fall Asleep
Image of an Ocean Beach
When I need to calm myself from to much stress I use an image of a beach in California. I try to include the smell of the …
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