Anxiety, an emotion/feeling that is referred to in many instances, that many of us
can relate to and are looking for ways to cope. Anxiety can often overwhelm us
to a point that we cannot make decisions and move forward with both simple and
complex tasks. It involves relaxing your mind and body, realistic thought
processes highlighting positive thinking, identifying negative and often distorted
thoughts, and gather evidence regarding the true or false existence of the issue
causing one’s anxiety.
I have highlighted ways to cope with anxiety and offered techniques that will help
diminish its effective on daily functioning.
Relax your body There are many techniques. The success with relaxation depends on giving peace of mind a huge priority in your overall scheme of values. Some suggestions are calming breaths, abdominal breathing and yoga.
Relax your mind This can be done using guided visualizations to calm your mind. It is a method of deliberately using mental imagery to modify your behavior, the way you feel and even your internal physiological state. Some suggestions to help this could be meditation and calming music.
Think realistically
What you allow your mind to think is what you get. Negative framing leads to negative thoughts. Positive framing leads to positive thoughts.
Fearful thinking takes many forms, but anxiety sufferers are often acquainted with catastrophizing. This means imagining some disaster is imminent.
Catastrophizing relies on overestimation of the odds or a bad outcome as well as an underestimation of your ability to cope with it.
Challenge Catastrophizing by:
Identifying the distorted thoughts. Change the “what if “statements into regular factual statements.
Questioning their validity – challenge the distortions
Replacing them with realistic thoughts
Other distorted pattern of thoughts include:
Filtering: You focus on the negative details while ignoring all the positive aspects of a situation. Solution: shift focus by focusing on the solution instead of the problem or focus on the opposite of your primary mental theme, which with anxiety is danger or insecurity. Focus on things in the environment that represent comfort.
Polarized thinking: Things are black and white, good or bad. Solution: Stop making black-or-white judgments. Think in terms of percentages.
Overgeneralization: You reach a general conclusion based on a single incident or piece of evidence. You exaggerate the frequency of problems and use negative global labels. This pattern can lead to an increasingly restricted life that can lead to phobias. Solution: Overgeneralization is exaggeration. Fight it by quantifying; avoid using words like huge, massive, and awful.
Mind reading: Without their saying so, you just “know” what people are feeling and why they act the way they do. In particular, you have certain knowledge of how people think and feel about you. You’re afraid to check it out with them. Many incorrect assumptions are often made this way. Solution: You are probably better off making no inferences at all about people’s internal thoughts. Either believe what they tell you or hold no belief at all until some conclusive evidence comes you way.
Magnifying: You exaggerate the degree or intensity of a problem. You turn up the volume on anything bad, making it loud, large and overwhelming. Solution: Stop using words like terrible, awful or horrendous. Banish phrases like “ I can’t stand it” or “It’s impossible”.
Personalization: You assume that everything people do or say is some kind of reaction to you. You also frequently compare yourself to others, trying to determine who is smarter, more competent, better looking and so on. Because of this, you view your own worth as dependent on how you measure up to others. This causes anxiety because you worry about whether you measure up. Solution: When you catch yourself comparing yourself to others, remind yourself that everyone has strong and weak points. By matching your weak points to other people’s corresponding strong points, you are looking for ways to demoralize yourself.
Shoulds: You have a list of ironclad rules about how you and others should act. Solution: Reexamine and question any personal rules or expectations that include the words should, ought, have to or must. Flexible rules and expectation don’t use these words because there are always exceptions and special circumstances.
Face your fears
Phobia-related anxiety: For many people anxiety stems from phobias. A phobia is an exaggerated fear of a particular situation or experience that causes your anxiety to spike. Usually, you avoid situations. In some cases, even the thought of the feared situation is enough to trigger your anxiety. The fear and avoidance are strong enough to interfere with your normal routines, work or relationships, and cause you significant distress. If you have a phobia, your anxiety does not come out of the blue, as it does for some people. It is caused by the thought or the real possibility of being in a feared situation. One treatment for phobias is Exposure Therapy. This is often called real-life desensitization. It is essentially the process of desensitizing yourself to your phobia.
Turn off your worry Obsessive worry often becomes a negative spiral that can easily end in anxiety. When you’re locked in a spiral, you tend to ruminate on perceived danger until it eclipses all other thoughts and you feel trapped. On a physiological and psychological level, anxiety becomes the next logical step – the natural response to the feeling of your mind spinning out of control. Distract yourself from worry. You need to change your focus from the cerebral to the practical. You need to become engaged in a project or activity. Some examples include physical exercise, talk to someone, listen to music that unlocks emotions for you, Do twenty minutes of deep relaxation, use visual distraction, express your creativity and repeat positive affirmations to name a few.
Cope on the spot It is important to lean into your anxiety. Resisting or fighting anxiety is likely to make it worse. A more constructive approach is to cultivate an attitude that says, “Okay, here it is again. I can do this. I’ve handled this before.” To cope with anxiety at the moment, there are three types of recommended activities. They are: 1. coping strategies, which are techniques to offset anxiety or distract yourself from it; 2. coping statements, which are mental techniques designed to redirect your mind away from and replace fearful self-talk; and 3. affirmations which can be used much like coping statement but are intended to work over a longer period of time and to work are changing your core beliefs.
Blog prepared by Anna T. Micci, LICSW
Taken from: Coping with Anxiety by Edmund Bourne, PhD and Lorna
Garano New Harbinger Publications, Oakland, CA. Copyright 2003
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