One man, one mission. To rid the world of chronic anxiety once and for all, the anxiety guy Dennis Simpsick shares his personal transformation from living a life filled with overwhelming worry to becoming a full-fledged positivity machine.

A leading authority in generalizing anxiety, Dennis gets to the truth of your mental health challenges and sets you on a path to transforming each and every area of your life.

Here he is, the one and only, the anxiety guy.

Warriors, welcome to episode number 302. This is the anxiety guy podcast. Thank you for joining me. I'm Dennis Simpsick.

If you're enjoying this podcast, please give it a positive rate and review as well.

If you'd like, please go ahead and visit the anxiety guy.com and learn more about the health anxiety program that just came out 12 weeks to freedom from health anxiety at the anxiety guy.com.

And Warriors, in this podcast episode, I want to talk about something that normally doesn't come into our conscious awareness.

I want to talk about addictions. Yes, addictions. When we think addiction, many of us only think about substance related addictions.

But the truth is there is another form of addictions working below the level of conscious awareness that is pulling you into a world that feels real but only keeps you farther from living a creative life away from anxiety.

I, just to give you some feedback, had so many addictions, many addictions, these addictions were mentally related, they were behaviorally related, they were emotionally related, they were verbally related.

I kept doing the same things all the time. And at some point, I felt like this was normal, this was who I was and this is the way I needed to react to some kind of a threat.

Addictions are habits that have become a part of our everyday life, which keeps us from seeing the truth about things.

These addictions have a subconscious motivation behind them, a reason to maintain an action because it serves a purpose or fulfills a need.

Now, when we think about addictions now, I want you to think about your thought patterns, for example.

Do you run certain thought patterns every single day and confuse yourself between thinking and remembering?

Remembering is replaying the same thought each and every day around the same type of situation.

Thinking is more of a conscious act, which doesn't necessarily go in the direction of your instincts, but more so your intuitiveness and your intelligence.

Take a health anxiety sufferer, for example. This person is constantly confusing their anxiety symptoms as being a physical illness or disease, they're afraid.

And this is just one example of being a health anxiety sufferer.

Now, this person has an addiction to these ideas or perceptions related to their anxiety symptoms. Why?

Well, if they were to let go of this addiction and they were to think that their anxiety symptoms are in fact just that anxiety symptoms, it makes them feel like they're losing something.

Or it makes them feel like something bad is going to happen to them. So they are addicted to this mental pattern that continues to play out each and every day every time their anxiety symptoms show up. That's an addiction.

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