After retiring from the building trade John decided to write his first ever self help book

After hanging up his hard hat, hi-vis waistcoat and tools for the final time, John stepped away from his bustling building trade business that he owned and directed for decades.

But retirement wasn’t a time for putting his feet up. Driven by a deep need to make sense of his own past struggles, he spent the next three years glued to his desk, translating a lifetime of hard-won wisdom into words. He labored meticulously over a book detailing his personal journey through the grueling-grip of The Anxiety State and in-particular OCD, offering a lifeline to others trapped in the same mental loop.

He called his masterpiece “Acceptance Change the way you are thinking”.

When the book was finally ready, John turned to Facebook to spread the word. He set up his page, shared his story, and eagerly began promoting his message. Then, without warning, the algorithms struck: Facebook permanently banned his account for “impersonating a celebrity.” John was baffled. He wasn’t trying to be famous—he was just a retired builder trying to help people heal!

What felt like a devastating setback, however, turned out to be a stroke of pure bliss. Forced to look elsewhere, John stumbled upon Substack. Almost overnight, he found a thriving, supportive community of like-minded authors and readers who were pursuing the exact same mission of truth and recovery.

Now settled into his digital home, John shares a daily sticky post-it note, a daily thought bubble, and weekly deep-dive articles like the one you are reading now, detailing the precise steps of how he broke free from a crippling mental prison of THE ANXIETY STATE.

I will write below some of the excerpts from John’s book that he spent 3 years writing just to give you some idea of how he became well educated from years of research into how his mind was working. He tried and tested all what he learned from all the books that he had read on himself to see if they worked. I will start by telling you how he found out why he was feeling so crap all the time:

This is a Excerpt from John’s book

“Acceptance Change the way you are thinking:”

The way we are thinking has a dramatic effect on the way we are feeling—this is a well-known scientific fact. So to change the way we are feeling, all we have to do is change the way we are thinking. This is such a simple solution to a complicated situation, so why is it such a big deal and complicated? It’s because of all the human emotions that get in the way of us performing this solution.

First of all, you may ask yourself: why can’t we just stop thinking negative and repetitive thoughts and just start thinking more positive thoughts? Everyone knows that’s all we need to do, right?

WRONG! There is far more to it than that.

Firstly, we have no control over our incoming (and mostly) negative and repetitive thoughts—no one has. Secondly, even if we did have control, most people would not know how to filter and channel their intrusive, damaging thoughts. They would just get caught up in their false accusations and corrupt, untrue fears and stories that their minds would conjure up all the time in the form of worrying.

On average, we humans have 60,000 thoughts enter our heads every single day at a speed of 300 mph. That is also a well-known scientific fact. The majority of those thoughts are either negative or repetitive; very few are positive.

So, we are up against a MASSIVE challenge. The odds are stacked against us right from the start.

What’s even more damaging in today’s society is that we are faced with an awful lot of negativity that gets rammed down our throats every single hour of every single day. Every time we turn our TV or radio sets on, we have nothing but useless information and bad news thrown at us that doesn’t concern us one tiny little bit. We are informed that there has been a coach crash in the remote regions of China and 10 people have been killed.

Don’t get me wrong here! I am not insensitive about this news—I know it is devastating to the ones involved in that terrible accident. But-what-the-fuck can WE do about it?

Why should we in the UK or the US even know about it? Surely we should be spared this negative information that only inflicts damaging effects on our emotional reserves. Even if relatives of the terrible accident ‘do’ live in the UK or the US they should NOT find out this way by listening to the news.

Some critics out there might say: “Just turn the news off and avoid listening to it” This is correct and a wise decision to make, but some how, some body, will let you know sometime during the day during a casual conversation. Even the other day my wife went to fetch some cobs from our local bakery and she heard the shop keeper wish the male customer in front of her: “To have a nice day” the male customer replied “I will try but some fucker will come along and spoil it, no doubt”

When we were living in our little caves or mud huts during our early primitive age, we didn’t even know what was going on in the next village, never mind what was going on in the remote regions of frigging China! Can’t you see that in today’s society we are taking in far too much negative information?

So what is the answer? We can’t escape from living in this society—we are stuck here; it is the way we have chosen to live. And when you think of it, our brains have not changed that dramatically since our cave-dwelling days. We may have developed more memory capacity, but our primitive nervous systems still operate and respond to fear exactly as they did when we were faced with ferocious animals thousands of years ago.

Although we can’t escape from all this uncontrollable chaos, and we can’t stop intrusive thoughts from entering our heads every day so... WHAT IS THE ANSWER?

The answer is: we can ACCEPT its presence and DEAL WITH IT. And the only way we can deal with it is by how we react to it.

This is our only ‘defense mechanism’, and the only way we can defend ourselves from being attacked by all this damaging, soul-destroying garbage is by training our MIND GUARD well.

SO, What is a MIND GUARD?

I have developed an imaginary Mind Guard in my head that sits on a shelf at the entrance of my mind. His job is to protect my mind from invading, intrusive, negative, and useless thoughts that want to disrupt my life.

Ok, I know what you are all thinking: “This guy’s flipped his lid, let’s stop reading this garbage.” But stay with me on this one—PLEASE. “I can vouch that I am completely sane and haven’t gone off my trolley!”

This imaginary Mind Guard is trained to evaluate all the thoughts that casually pass through my head each minute of EVERY day. He checks to see if they are of any use to me, acting as an informational filter that consciously or subconsciously controls what I want—and don’t want—to think about and channels it to the right department! This stops my mind from being constantly bombarded by useless clutter.

Let’s face it: we have control over what we want to talk about, so why do we struggle so much with what we want to think about?

Here are the facts that you need to know. (Read the next section without stopping—it will make more sense!):

The-reason-why-you-are-feeling-CRAP! Is-because-of-the-way-you-are-thinking, this-is-causing-your-brain-to-go-into-survival-mode, and-as-long-as-your-brain-is-in-survival-mode, the-longer-it-thinks-it-is-in-some-kind-of-danger, and-the-longer-it-thinks-it-is-in-some-kind-of-danger, the-longer-it-will-keep-releasing-adrenaline-and-cortisol, the-two-fear-hormones-that-are-keeping-you-feeling-the-way-you-are-feeling, because-of-the-way-you-are-thinking.

(Take a DEEP breath here and read it again if it has not sunk in)

It is a vicious downward cycle that is impossible to escape from unless you know how to stop it. Without the right approach, you will always remain in the centre of this uncomfortable, self-repelling chaos of a hellhole.

You need to find the answer so you can start living your life again, feel happy and content, and finally be settled in your own mind.

Learn how to train your MIND GUARD well. Read my book:

Acceptance Change the way you are thinking.

I truly hope it helps any of you who are suffering like I did for so many years, until I finally found the answer in ACCEPTANCE and EQUANIMITY.

The end of excerpt.

John try‘s every day to get this message across to others who are struggling like he did before he found the answer in Acceptance.

To learn more why don’t you buy John’s book.

Click Here