NOTE FROM TED: While some viewers might find advice provided in this talk to be helpful as a complementary approach, please do not look to this talk for medical advice. This talk only represents the speaker’s personal understanding of and experiences with anxiety. TEDx events are independently organized by volunteers. The guidelines we give TEDx organizers are described in more detail here: http://storage.ted.com/tedx/manuals/tedx_content_guidelines.pdf


What if it turned out that anxiety isn’t actually our enemy? What if we suddenly realised our fear was trying to help us? What would happen if we stopped trying to fight anxiety and embraced it as a trusted friend?

Tim Box is a therapist, author and anxiety expert, and in his youth experienced debilitating levels of social anxiety.
Tim has spent a large part of the last 10 years helping people understand and control their anxiety response and at some point during the last decade he started to get the distinct impression that most people dealing with anxiety were thinking about it in entirely the wrong way.

In this talk Tim explains why we need to think about anxiety differently, why the help we are being offered often exacerbates the problem, and how a very simple shift in the way we think about our own emotional responses can free us from our diagnoses and help us all feel a lot less anxious about anxiety. Tim is a remedial hypnotist and mind management expert. He helps people get back in control of the way they think, feel and behave.

Having overcome his own social anxiety in the past, he now specialises in treating anxiety issues. In 2017 he published his first book; Clear Your Head: The simple guide to enjoying your life without anxiety getting in the way. This went on to become an Amazon number 1 bestseller in its category. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx