Postcard to Anxiety™ – User Guide

Relates to “Postcard to Anxiety™” – Anxiety-Control Package

What we’re here to do

Change your relationship to anxiety and your response to the causes of anxiety.
Follow the science to reduce the space in your being/system that harbours anxiety and increase the space that promotes calm, wellbeing, confidence and happiness.
No-one can live a life completely free of anxiety – because we can’t control the world around us. But we can control how we respond to things we find challenging. As you’re about to discover….

How we’re going to do it

Many people who suffer from a specific anxiety, or persistent general anxiety, think that this is an inescapable state. The first goal of the ‘Postcard to Anxiety’ programme is to explain and demonstrate that this isn’t the case. You will recognise and experience change quite early in the programme.

The programme initiates change at the levels of emotion, awareness and behaviour.

In simple terms, during the online sessions we work on your emotional self and make the subconscious aware that change is not only possible, but desirable and enjoyable.
In the offline sessions, you embed the learnings and messages of the online sessions through your own reasoning process – guided by the ‘postcards’ we provide you.
Finally, we build up through the course of the programme to changed responses to the causes of anxiety, and so to changed behaviour and to a new ‘way of being’.

The programme leaves you with a range of powerful tools that you can use to continue your progress, should you need. We also identify the numerous other ‘standalone’ programmes from ThinkWell-LiveWell that you can continue to use as and when you choose. You really will find this to be the ‘complete package’.

What you have to do

This programme consists of ten online sessions with offline, cognitive behavioural exercises for you to follow in-between.
You listen; then you think, and write. You absorb, then you express. You imagine, then you reason.
Just because there are ten sessions, you don’t have to race and try to ‘finish’ in ten days flat. Take your time: you can repeat days, you can take ‘time-outs’ by listening to another programme from all that ThinkWell-LiveWell offers.
The online sessions vary in length, from just 17 minutes up to 35 minutes. The offline exercises will take… as long as they take.

Warning:

Expect some confusion and ‘overload’ in the early stages – it’s deliberate. The more ‘fun’ stuff comes later in the programme.
You should enter into this programme knowing that you have work to do, and you will have to commit time and effort – as you do for so many good things in life!

And… why ‘Postcard to Anxiety™’?

There are a few simple reasons for the programme name:

We always talk about writing the offline exercises as postcards: you can take this literally, by buying a pack of blank postcards or dividing up printer paper(!), Or you can use gigantic sheets of paper – just as long as you think of ‘postcards’ figuratively as messages to… Yourself, either in the past, present or future? The world and the ‘slings and arrows of outrageous fortune’? Other people or another person, from anywhere in your life or consciousness?
If you choose to use actual postcards, or something of that size, then you can carry this/these with you during your normal day, even in a pocket, and help the process by referring to them or working on them whenever you want or need.
Postcards have a great creative advantage: one side is supposed to carry an image, so you can have conceptual fun with this by creating collages, drawing images, thinking of sound libraries / playlists, thinking of tactile panels – whatever you feel helps to summarise your emotions as you go through the process.

*https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/what-does-mindfulness-meditation-do-to-your-brain/