Читать книгу Self-Help for Your Nerves: Learn to relax and enjoy life again by overcoming stress and fear - Dr. Weekes Claire - Страница 29

After examining these ‘terrible feelings’, I want you to remain seated and concentrate on each in turn and try to make it worse. You will find you cannot. Apparently the power of the adrenalin-releasing nerves is limited. You may succeed in slightly intensifying its effect with concentration, but only slightly. And yet, all this time, without realizing it, you have been shrinking from facing these symptoms squarely because you were afraid that by so doing you would somehow make them worse. It was as if you gave them a fearful, sideways glance.

Let me reassure you. You cannot increase your symptoms by facing them or even trying to intensify them. In fact, you may find that when you try consciously to make them worse, they improve. The very act of concentrating on them in this way means that, for the time being at least, you look at them with interest rather than fear, and even this brief respite from tension may have a calming effect. Symptoms can be intensified only by further fear and its resulting tension, never by relaxing, facing and accepting. Are you beginning to suspect that your symptoms may have had you bluffed? They most certainly have.

A student whose sensations were very much as I have described, could make little headway at his study because of banging heart, sweating hands and churning stomach. One day, when he thought he would go crazy unless he could get relief, a friend, an ex-soldier, came to see him. He told his friend about his suffering and said, ‘I can’t stand it much longer. I have done all I can to fight it and I dont know which way to turn next. Surely there is a way out of this hell?’

The friend explained that many soldiers at the ‘front’ had had nerves like this until they realized they were only being bluffed by them. He advised the youth to stop being bluffed by his nerves, to float past all suggestion of self-pity and fear and go on with his work. The student saw the light and from being afraid to put one foot in front of the other for fear of damaging his heart, in two weeks was climbing mountains. That was many years ago. He has similar feelings from time to time when overwrought but he knows that they will pass if he relaxes, accepts and floats past them. He has learnt how to live with his nerves.