Читать книгу Self-Help for Your Nerves: Learn to relax and enjoy life again by overcoming stress and fear - Dr. Weekes Claire - Страница 22

Begin with the nervous feeling in your stomach, the so-called churning. This may feel like an uneasy fluttering or may bore steadily like a hot poker passing from your stomach through your back. Do not tensely flinch from it. Go with it. Relax and analyse it. Take a few minutes to do this before reading further.

Now that you have faced and examined it, is it so terrible? If you had arthritis in your wrist, you would be prepared to work with the arthritic pain without becoming too upset. Why regard this churning as something so different from ordinary pain that it can frighten you? Stop regarding it as some monster trying to possess you. Understand that it is but the working of oversensitized adrenalin-releasing nerves and that by constantly shrinking from it you have stimulated an excessive outflow of adrenalin which has further excited your nerves to produce continual churning.

While you examine and analyse this churning a strange thing may happen: you may find your attention wandering from yourself. This ‘thing’ that seemed so terrible while you stayed tense and flinched from it, may fail to hold your attention for long when you see it for what it is – no more than a strange physical feeling of no great medical significance, and causing no real harm.

So, be prepared to accept and live with it for the time being. Accept it as something that will be with you for some time yet – in fact while you recover – but something that will eventually leave you if you are prepared to let time pass and not anxiously watch the churning during its passing.

But do not make the mistake of thinking that it will go as soon as you cease to fear it. Your nervous system is still tired and will take time to heal, just as a broken leg takes time. However, as you improve and are no longer afraid of the churning, and do not try to cure it by controlling it, and are prepared to accept it and work with it present, you will become more interested in other things and will gradually forget to notice whether it is there or not. This is the way to recover. By true acceptance you break the fear – adrenalin – fear cycle, or, in other words, the churning-adrenalin-churning cycle.