Welcome to the Anxiety Slayer series. Our mission is to assist you with creating more peace and tranquility in your life

through anxiety release exercises and supportive tools created to slay your

anxiety.

Hello, Ananga, it's wonderful to come together again with you for a new anxiety slayer session. Absolutely love receiving questions from anxiety slayer listeners and this week is an excellent topic about hiding from anxiety or better

yet how to stop hiding from anxiety and here is what our listener said.

Hi, I hide from my anxiety with video games. I use brute force, fighting with myself to cope, but there's so much pain that I need to numb. I'm working with my

doctor but I wonder if you have any tips to help me stop hiding from anxiety.

Hmm really good question. I hope the doctor is supportive and is helping you find a way to

manage your anxiety and find a way out of anxiety. I think it's a really understandable

response to anything that causes us pain is to want to hide or run

away or escape from it. Every living being does that. We all have this built in aversion to anything that causes us

fear and mental discomfort. So it's really natural to want to escape and want to

hide from it. And there are lots of ways people do it. Television, movies, alcohol,

recreational drugs and video games. They're some of the most popular, most common choices for doing that.

And in a way you could say that to escape into a video game is not so harmful as some of the other choices,

but it does present its own challenges that in the long term may not help you in your recovery from anxiety.

One of the reasons for that is that it's incredibly immersive.

These role-playing games that are now available where you can put yourself in a first-person situation

and you can really start to identify with the character and with what's happening in that game

which is a way in a sense to escape from what's going on in your own mind and in your

own life.

But in another way it sets up a disconnect between the real you and your real life. enter into a disassociated state where you in a

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