Imagine if you woke up one day and no longer felt Stress or Anxiety. You would go through your entire day without a care in the world, and not a twinge of fear. Your boss could be shouting at you, your partner could be threatening to leave, or your child could be in trouble at school, but none of it would affect you. You would remain, calm, equanimous, and pristine throughout it all. Your mind would be a pure sanctum, totally shielded from the nightmares of the external world. 

It sounds like a crazy fantasy, but given how frazzled and burned out people are these days, many are seriously considering giving it a go. They watch in awe as sages and yogis appear unperturbed by even the most dire external circumstances, and they wish they could be like them. 

It’s all being driven by people’s dissatisfaction with their emotional state. They are getting sick and tired of feeling anxious and stressed all the time. In their heart of hearts, they find it hard to believe that this is how people are supposed to live. The more they think about it, the more they want to get rid of it. 

This realisation is leading to a new kind of awakening in the West. People are getting the sense that instead of accepting that stress and anxiety are just “a part of life,” that in fact, they can leave them behind. Whenever they feel themselves falling into a profound state of misery, they catch themselves, and practice letting it go, instead of allowing it to capture them completely. 

Creating Little Machines In The Mind

But how is this possible? It all comes down to the remarkable plasticity of the human Brain. The same tendencies that cause people to feel frazzled all the time are also the tendencies that can save them, as long as they are channelled in the right way. 

Neuroscience and experience both confirm that “we are what we practice” and “we are what we think.” In other words, the more you engage a particular brain pattern, the more likely it is to occur in the future. If you ride a bicycle everyday, you’ll get very good at it. Similarly, if you let everything in life affect you on an emotional level, you’ll excel at that, too. 

The trick here is to rewire the machine. There’s nothing you can do about the anxiety pathways directly: they’re already baked into your brain. However, you can create a new little anti-anxiety machine that helps to defuse the original, robbing it of its power. 

That’s exactly what’s happening in the new movement to leave stress and anxiety behind. People aren’t becoming buddhas. Instead, they’re just practising new states of being. They’re discovering that they have the capacity for peace and then building a foundation from there. 

Of course, help is always available in the form of CBD patches, meditation, massage and deep breathing. But the new movement is all about leaving these negative feelings behind for good. 

There’s really no need for them. And thanks to the way the brain works, people can defuse them.