Stop Anxiety from Stopping You: The Breakthrough Program For Conquering Panic and Social Anxiety

Stop Anxiety from Stopping You: The Breakthrough Program For Conquering Panic and Social Anxiety

Helen Odessky




To Alex and Maya





FOREWORD

There are not many physical and emotional feelings more wildly uncomfortable than anxiety. Only anxiety sufferers truly know this for certain. For some, anxiety can feel like a background hum, a freight train of diffused fear rumbling down the tracks in the deep recesses of our mind, persistent and chronic. Others describe it as a sudden, unpredictable surge of adrenaline coursing through their veins, constricting their senses and gripping their minds with fear.

For me and many other sufferers, anxiety was a constant threat of fear and discomfort, a thief of presence and joy. At its worst, in the midst of panic, it felt embarrassing, stunningly disempowering, even life-threatening. This was unreasonable, of course, but that is the very nature of anxiety.

An overriding anxious feeling, or outright panic, takes precedence over whatever else may be going on at any given moment in a sufferer’s life. As a result, those of us who suffer, or have suffered, panic and anxiety miss out on so many of the precious moments of our lives, surrendering them to a force we know is within us, but feel we cannot control. The cycles of anxiety and panic can feel truly ominous, terrifying, and at times, hopeless. Having suffered profound anxiety myself, and treated hundreds of anxiety and panic sufferers over the past twenty years, I know this to be true.

So, we seek answers. We Google and we browse. We fill our bookshelves with the latest, greatest quick fixes. We seek therapists, psychiatrists and coaches, desperate for relief. Most of us are able to find it in these methods, but only briefly, temporarily. We learn to breathe deeply, slowly in, and slowly out. We shift our internal dialogue. We meditate and exercise. We cut caffeine from our diets.

And of course, any of these can be helpful in curbing anxiety and panic. But too often, these “solutions” are offered in isolation, the One Way to finally beat your anxiety and panic. Disappointingly, any of these alone can only be a stopgap, leaving anxiety waiting in the wings for its next opportunity.

So of course, there are countless books written on anxiety and panic, and you might be wondering why this is the one for you. I recommend this particular book, and only this book, as Dr. Odessky provides herein all of the information, tools, resources, and hope you will need to best manage your anxiety and panic. She offers success stories from her own life, and her clinical life, that will finally resonate with you. The U.N.L.O.C.K system she has developed will not only provide you with a template to refer to moment-to-moment, day-to-day, and week-to-week, but also the empowerment to truly know that you can break the cycle. In this regard, this work is wholly unique. The tips she offers are not patronizing filler, but solid tools you can put to work to mitigate your anxiety and panic right away.

Dr. Odessky has made it her life’s work to alleviate the anxiety her clients and others suffer. She is tireless in this effort, and I sincerely honor this result of her work. Her knowledge, self-assuredness, and good humor will provide you immediate comfort and relief. Helen has been working for years to develop and perfect her UNLOCK program, and it works. She has come up with something revolutionary here I have never seen before: not in graduate school, not in treatment, and not in decades of reading and researching anxiety. Read this book, and you will find everything you need to beat anxiety once and for all. It’s not a trick, or a quickie one-off. Instead, it is a comprehensive, easy-to-apply system for anxiety eradication. Keep this book close. Take your time and work through it. Trust Helen to guide you through.

It will change your life. It will free you. Finally.





Dr. John Duffy is the author of The Available Parent: Radical Optimism For Raising Teens and Tweens.





PROLOGUE

Sitting in my apartment, I felt the walls slowly closing in; there was nowhere to go. This was the place I felt the safest. Now – even here – I felt on shaky ground. I was trembling, and I had what felt like a cinder block on my chest; tears welled up in my eyes, and there was nothing I could do to stop it. I felt caged, imprisoned by my emotions – with very little hope of parole. Searching to steady myself, I looked in the mirror, staring at a person I hardly recognized. This was the moment I knew that I had to do something about anxiety or it was going to consume me and run my life.

About ten years ago, shortly after being newly licensed as a clinical psychologist, anxiety hit like a tornado. Everything in my life had been going well. I had married the man I loved, with whom I was going to build a future. The grueling days of graduate school were finally behind me. I was employed in my field of work and finally getting a steady paycheck I could actually live off. My colleagues congratulated me on passing the licensing exam, and I was getting a raise. Yes, objectively, things were going swimmingly. Inside, however, was a different story. I suddenly found myself battling severe anxiety.

I started waking up with a sense of dread. I started doubting my abilities. And worst of all, none of this made any sense to me. Now that I had finally gotten to the point where my life had become a lot less stressful and deadline-driven, now that I could finally relax a bit, how could I develop this sudden and unrelenting anxiety? I also felt as if I somehow should not have this anxiety just by virtue of being a psychologist. So I went along, putting a smile on my face and pretending that everything was okay. As you can imagine, things did not get better; I only felt more isolated, and the anxiety continued.