Facing Up To Your Anxiety

Understanding and facing up to anxiety is a very big part of getting better. So let’s have a think about your anxiety problem: 

• Is your anxiety related to certain situations?
• Is your anxiety related to certain places?
• Is your anxiety related to certain people?
• Is your anxiety worse at particular times of the day?
• Are there realistic worries that you have that would make anyone anxious? 

Because anxiety is a 'behavioural' condition, it can only be successfully treated by behavioural techniques.  You already know what anxiety is and what can cause it, but try to learn to recognise what can keep it going for you. Do this and you’re halfway there! 

• Try to identify situations you find stressful by noticing the beginnings of tension. This way you can “nip them in the bud” and reduce the physical severity of the physical symptoms. 
• Take steps to tackle what it is about these situations that you find stressful. 
• Start to use relaxation in everyday situations.
• Use parts of the relaxation to help in really difficult situations, e.g. breathing slowly.

Treating anxiety isn't about thinking your way out of the disorder like some people will tell you. It's about undoing changes which have been made to the part of your brain responsible for storing the anxious 'memory'. When anxiety occurs in certain situations it has become a learned response to those situations and it is a question of learning a new (relaxed) response to replace the old (learned) response. 

You could try drawing up a hierarchy (a kind of “pecking order”) of your most feared situations. Put the least fearful situation at the top of the list and your most feared situation at the bottom of the list. Try writing down your own thoughts about situations where you become anxious.

Now confront the least threatening situation first and allow yourself to experience the lessening of your anxiety in that situation before progressing to what you think of as a slightly more threatening situation from your list. And don’t forget to PRAISE YOURSELF on how well you are doing!

Gradually facing the situations and things that you fear the most (this is called ‘exposure’) is particularly useful for situations in which you find yourself the most fearful.