You’re Ignoring the Most Dangerous Addiction of All

What’s the first thing you feel when you wake up?

Worry? Anxiety? Resentment? It happens so fast it’s like you have no choice in the matter. 

What if I told you these uncomfortable feelings (and all uncomfortable feelings) are addictions that you can let go and have a joyful life of waking up stress-free?

You don’t Know you’re Addicted

My favorite definition of addiction is this:

“Continued use despite adverse consequences.” — Judson Brewer, M.D., Ph.D

Be honest: you continue to allow and affirm disempowering emotions despite adverse consequences, don’t you?

Not only disempowering emotions that make YOU feel bad, but emotions that make you bite your kids’ heads off, distance yourself from your partner, and judge yourself and everyone else constantly, and make you unapproachable. It feels like garbage, and yet… you continue to do it. 

You might be thinking, “sure, Tracy, but I can CHOOSE not to eat chocolate or drink wine. I can’t CHOOSE how I feel.”

Allow me to blow your mind, because….

You have Agency over Your Emotions

One more time, for the people in the back: you have agency over your emotions! 

You can CHOOSE HOW YOU FEEL. Take a minute to let that sink in, because it’s a paradigm shift. Your emotions are not fixed. You can heal the trauma that is connected to your emotional addictions and CHOOSE the feelings of your future.

This is the next frontier of human consciousness. We've had the agricultural, scientific, industrial, and technological revolutions. The Consciousness Revolution is next. Look at what’s happening in our world right now. The awakening is upon us! Are you willing to open your eyes?

I hope you said YES, because you can do this. To begin, you must understand where your emotional addictions come from, and how they have served you to this point. 

Where do Your Emotional Addictions come from? 

Take a deep breath and ask yourself: what emotions were most common in my childhood? What did I see my parents doing? What was the vibe in my household as a little girl? What feelings can I recall feeling frequently? Chaos? Insecurity? Pressure?

What happened to you growing up — and not just you, all of us — created emotional coping mechanisms that you believed you needed to survive. Even if you grew up in a safe, loving home, emotional coping crops up in school and social relationships, too. Anxiety is a frequent emotional coping mechanism that adults struggle with, so let me show you how it plays out:

Let’s say you didn’t feel safe when you were young. You lived in a home where you didn’t know what would happen next because you had an alcoholic parent.

Your young self learned to use anxiety so you would always be “ready” for an uncertain future. Anxiety is constant futuring and living in survival mode. Control is a close friend of anxiety, and it’s easy to see how your young self searched for things she could control, since she couldn’t control big things that were happening around her. 

We all created emotional habits growing up. They helped us adapt to our environment. But now that you’re an adult you can’t get rid of anxiety because that habit became an addiction. It’s your emotional homeostasis — the “neutral” setting your system is used to. Instead of a calm “rest and digest” state, you’re used to anxiety. That’s your “normal.”

Wonder Bread or Multigrain?

It’s not your young self’s fault that this happened. She didn’t know better. 

Now you know better than your young self did. Now you have tools and resources available to you to quit those addictions and open yourself to nourishing emotions: connection, ease, elation, bliss, confidence. You have the inner power and agency to align to those new emotions now and catapult yourself into a way of being that is better than you’ve let yourself imagine.

Relying on the coping mechanisms from your childhood is like eating white Wonder Bread. We all know multigrain is more nutritious. Why keep eating the empty calories when there’s a healthier, tastier option?

The Dawn of Your New Future

It’s essential to address and heal your emotional addictions. You can’t be, have, or create any different result if you live your life guided by the same old emotional addictions. Instead: 

“You have to break the habit of being yourself and reinvent a new self; lose your mind and create a new one; prune synaptic connections and nurture new ones; unmemorize past emotions and recondition the body to a new mind and emotions; and let go of the past and create a new future.” - Dr. Joe Dispenza

If you learn agency over your emotions you can shift your feelings and thoughts and catapult yourself into the actualization of how you want your life to feel every day. This is the key to your Queendom. 

The emotions of your past will not bring you a new future. But the emotions of your future — YOU can choose them. And when you do, you feel the way you dream of feeling and your desires fall into place.

It Starts with the Power of Calm 

The Power of Calm is the starting point to apply this new emotional paradigm to your life. Through the power of calm, you will learn to recognize when you are using old emotions that don’t serve you. You’ll learn to call yourself out, with compassion and without judgment, and choose new feelings that will nourish you and your future. 

Without the power of calm, everything else is useless. From the place of calm, YOU can CHOOSE.

You can access the transformational power of calm right now in my free, 30-minute training. I teach you how to use calm to create safety in your mind and body, get out of your head and into your heart, take your power back from fear, and more. This is where it begins, and I’m giving you the how — not just the what — because application is what leads to transformation.  

Click here to give yourself this life-changing skill right now.

Tracy is a spiritual advisor and mindset teacher to women leaders and entrepreneurs, a highly sought after keynote speaker, a TEDx speaker, and international best-selling author.

Tracy teaches visionary women leaders and entrepreneurs to rise in all aspects of themselves. Her work is guided by the core principle that we are the root cause of everything we experience and therefore we are only ever one choice away from altering our life and results.

She has served thousands of women across 7 countries and has been featured in TEDx, Entrepreneur, FastCompany, Thrive Global, and Inc.com. Her book Worthy Human is a #1 best seller in Spiritual Growth and Mindset. This article was originally published here.