Everyone deals with anxiety - to one degree or another.

Some of us squash it down, some of us develop coping strategies, but nonetheless all of us know that gnawing feeling in the pit of our stomachs. That sense that things could go wrong.

It’s exhausting. It takes away from the quality of your work, and more importantly, the quality of your life. You wake up on days you should be excited with a sense of dread, and it wears at you.

But anxiety doesn’t need to be your foe. In fact, you can use the same mechanisms that cause anxiety to drive you towards what you want. The brain functions that cause anxiety are incredibly powerful, you just have to know how to use them.

I train my clients not on how to cope with anxiety, but on how to use it to get what they want.

It all starts with understanding where anxiety comes from.

Your Anxiety Is Driven By Fear and Overwhelm

There are two drivers of anxiety, and they form a mental circuit. They are:

-Overwhelm: This is the physical sensation you have when your brain recognizes it is trying to process too much. You are suddenly aware that you are out of your depth.

-Fear: This an emotional reaction to the possibility that things will go poorly. You can't stop thinking that you might not be able to finish everything, or to reach your goals.

These two drivers result in a never ending cycle. You are overwhelmed, and you have too much on your plate. This makes you fearful of the future, where you believe you will fail.

Your fear of the future leads you to imagine the various scenarios in which things go poorly, giving you more to process, creating an even greater sense of overwhelm.

It’s a painful, debilitating, and endless cycle, and it only gets harder to break as time goes on.

However, if you dig deeper into these drivers, you’ll see that they are just the product of a very basic mental function. One that you can harness to great success, if you know how.

Why Anxiety And Confidence Are Nearly Identical

At its core, all anxiety comes from the same thought process:

You look into the future, and you see something bad.

Think of your brain as the world’s most powerful film projector. It is constantly playing mental movies, and if that footage is distressing, your body reacts accordingly.

You’re months away from bonuses and you’re behind at work. You look into the future and see yourself getting “screwed,” and so you put your head down and work late every night.

While you’re working late every night, you start looking into the future and you see yourself missing dinners with your spouse, not being there for your children, losing all of your close relationships because you’re consumed by work.

You can’t win in that scenario. You will always be miserable, because, like watching The Kardashians, you are filling your mind with terrible thoughts.

But what if you changed the movie?

What if instead of seeing horrific failures, you saw a successful, happy version of yourself? What if you knew - with the same absolute certainty you currently have about your bad future - that things were going to go extremely well for you?

That’s what confidence is: looking into the future, and seeing something you like.

Anxiety and confidence are both products of the same mental projection booth, they’re just different films. Your TV can project the worst possible junk, or something wonderful, and your brain is exactly the same.

The trick is figuring out how you condition your brain to change the film.

How To Beat Anxiety By Conditioning Your Brain

Despite the popular message of the legal drug dealers, you don’t need a pill to overcome anxiety, and, in fact, you don’t want one. You can lose weight by dieting aggressively, but it’s exercising that actually makes you healthier.

Anxiety is the same way. Your brain can learn to beat anxiety, it just takes practice. To help my clients with this mental conditioning, I created a system called the House of Flow that helps them visualize a positive outcome, and then re-engage with the present moment.

There are 4 steps to the House of Flow:

Stop thinking about everything else.

Regardless of what you have on your plate for today, right now you are just reading this article. Nothing you are doing right now is affecting those other things, so stop thinking about them.

This can be hard, but it’s a matter of focus. You may be afraid of letting the thoughts go, and that’s alright, but decide to face that fear and release thoughts that get in the way of what you are doing right now.

Visualize the task at hand going great.

Right now you’re reading an article on how to overcome anxiety and empower yourself. Imagine yourself at the end of this article going forth and putting all of this into practice.

Imagine that you immediately begin overcoming anxiety, and that each day after today is lived with more and more confidence.

Ask yourself how that future feels.

Looking into a future where you are confident, where you live without overwhelming self-doubt and anxiousness. What does it feel like to live with such ease?

Practice this feeling and “wire it” into your neurology. Let that feeling inspire you, but also reassure you that everything is okay. If that is your future, what are you worried about?

Absorb fully into what you’re doing.

With that joyful confidence that the future will work itself out, allow yourself to engage fully in the present moment. You’re reading an article right now, and that’s it. Just absorb.

Afterwards, there will be another task at hand, and you will be 100% mentally engaged by it as well. Living right now in this moment is the antithesis of anxiety, and a major key to success.

Master this system, and you are training what we know to be the most important emotional state for peak happiness and performance, Flow.

How Anxiety Almost Derailed My Career - Until I Beat It

If I can give you an example from my own life, the House of Flow has changed everything for me.

I sat down to write my first book after spending some ten years compiling notes. When I was ready to write, I was looking at an unmanageable mess of 3,500 pages.

Overwhelm kicked in, and then Fear followed suit.

Every time I sat down to write I was overwhelmed by the sheer size of the task, and I immediately imagined it going badly. My book being terrible, or unfinished, and my whole project being a failure.

My problem wasn’t that I had too much information or that I had too big of a task in front of me, it was that I was allowing my brain to project a future that scared the shit out of me, and I wasn’t losing myself in the present.

For years I struggled with this, painfully forcing myself to write, while at the same time building the tools that I personally needed to keep driving my work, doing very hard things, yet feeling more and more amazing.

This eventually evolved into the House of Flow, where it all became very easy. I saw myself with a finished, amazing book, and that feeling got me excited about writing and reassured me that it was all going to work out.

Every day I sat down to write, I wasn’t thinking, “I've gotta write this book today.” I was thinking, “I’m going to spend 8 hours writing today - and I’m going to enjoy the hell out of it.”

I’ve written a lot about moving forward in life by focusing on the step right in front of you - asking what action moves the needle for you right now - and this is the same.

If anxiety is a problem of obsessively looking too far into the future and fearing disaster, then obsessively living in the present and looking forward to success is anxiety’s cure.

It’s also the outcome the House of Flow is guaranteed to ensure.

Your Anxiety Is Your Superpower In Disguise

There are a lot of articles on anxiety out there, and most of them are awful.

Yeah, you should eat a good diet, get enough sleep, and exercise regularly. But that’s not anxiety-specific advice, that’s just important for general health.

At the same time, anxiety isn’t some great motivator you need to inflict on yourself to get results. Think about cramming for tests. A lot of people believe that they need to put themselves under this level of mental stress to force themselves into action.

They aren’t actually that pitiful, they just believe they are. They fail to understand motivation, and instead use the pain of anxiety as a tool.

Anxiety doesn’t happen because your brain or body is weak, it happens for the opposite reason. Your mind is powerful enough to imagine your entire future, and sometimes that future is scary.

You don’t need to resent that strength, you need to admire it and leverage it to your advantage. The ability to project your future is a superpower, you just need to learn how to use it.

Mod Note (Andy): Best of 2016, this post ranks #9 for the past year