The Fear and Anxiety Solution

Friedemann Schaub, MD, PhD

A Breakthrough Process
for Healing and Empowerment
with Your Subconscious Mind

This book is dedicated to my parents,
Drs. Eva and Kurt Schaub.

W
HILE I WAS
finishing this book, both my parents passed away—my mother less than four months after my father. One night, a few days after my mom’s funeral, I woke up drenched in a cold sweat, gasping for air, and completely overwhelmed by a flood of emotions. My mind was spinning, and it took me a while to comprehend that I was having a panic attack. Although the loss of my parents had certainly taken an emotional toll on me, I hadn’t expected to tumble into a state of uncontrollable anxiety. As I gradually slowed my breathing, I noticed from deep within a small but undeniable voice asking, “What am I going to do? Who will take care of me? Who will make sure I’m safe?”

I knew these fearful thoughts didn’t come from my conscious adult mind. Logically, there was no reason for me to be worried. I’d been independent of my parents’ support for the past twenty years. But I also knew that logic and reasoning weren’t nearly enough to address this panic attack, because the source of this fearful voice came from a deeper place: my subconscious mind. So I applied some of the principles and methods of this book to consciously work with my subconscious mind, and within a matter of minutes, I felt much calmer and more at ease. Although I miss my parents and still grieve the loss, the panic I felt that night never returned.

You may wonder what this conscious-subconscious approach to working through fear and anxiety is all about and why or how I developed it. Well, it
actually
did
start with my parents. Both were family doctors in the small town of Lauterbach, located in the middle of the beautiful Black Forest in Germany. I always admired my parents’ dedication to their patients, many of whom they’d known since birth. They took the time to listen to their patients and then carefully considered their entire story—including their living situations, mental and emotional states, and histories—when evaluating the diagnosis and treatment plans. My parents taught me to view every person as a whole human being and not just as his or her symptoms or illness.

Of all my parents’ routine treatments, one fascinated me the most. Whenever children came to their practice with multiple warts on their hands or feet, my mother or father would pull out a massive bottle that contained some mysterious, colorful fluid. With great care, they’d fill a small vial with that potion and give it to the children, telling them to use a little brush to apply this medicine to their warts three times a day. “If you do this every day,” they said, “at exactly the same time, your warts will disappear in a few weeks.” The success rate of this treatment was astonishing.

However, when it was my turn to have my warts treated, my father didn’t pull out the magic bottle. Instead he revealed to me that the liquid was only water with food coloring. “All you need is to believe that the warts will disappear, and they will,” he explained. And so they did. The fact that we can make warts, which are caused by a virus, quickly disappear by simply believing they will, was for me the first compelling and influential demonstration of the power of the mind.

Yet it was a completely different demonstration of the power of our minds that motivated me years later to develop the breakthrough process for fear and anxiety described in this book. During a practicum in the local hospital, which was a part of my first year in medical school, I met an elderly farmer who’d been admitted with a broken leg. Despite a lifetime of hard physical labor, he had the constitution and vigor of a much younger man and was proud that this was the first time he had seen a hospital from the inside. One afternoon he confided to me that he was extremely worried about the upcoming surgery to set his leg. “Somehow I just know that if the doctors operate on me, I will die,” he said. I reassured him that this was a simple routine procedure, that there was nothing to worry about, and that everything would go as planned, without any complications. And it did.

The next morning the farmer was found dead in his hospital bed. Since there was no autopsy done, it remains unclear what caused his death. I often
wondered whether his anxiety played a part in his unexpected death. Could his system have shut down because the physical stress of the operation and the emotional stress of his fears were too much for him to bear?

After I became a physician, I worked in a huge cardiology unit at the University of Munich, Germany. Most of the patients I dealt with were suffering from strokes or heart attacks. Although an increasing number of studies have demonstrated how stress and anxiety could promote cardiovascular diseases, the emotional challenges of our patients were neither investigated nor addressed in the treatment plans. The focus was on treating the physical symptoms and controlling the common risk factors, such as high blood pressure, nicotine consumption, excessive weight, and elevated cholesterol levels—all of which can result from chronic stress. I often wanted to sit down with my patients and talk about their lives and how their illnesses were impacting them both mentally and emotionally. However, as is common in big hospitals, we could spend only ten to fifteen minutes per day with each patient—obviously not enough time to really get to know the people who faithfully put their lives in our hands.