ANXIETY AND TECHNIQUES TO MANAGE?IT

The largest part of what we call ‘personality’ is determined by how we’ve opted to defend ourselves against anxiety and sadness

WHAT IS ANXIETY?

Anxiety is our body’s natural response to stress.

It’s a feeling of fear or apprehension about what’s to come.

Like, the first day of school, going to a job interview, or giving a speech may cause most people to feel fearful and nervous.

So in simple terms when we feel fearful and nervous about something; we become anxious…

A big event or a build-up of smaller stressful life situations may trigger the anxiety — for example, a death in the family, work stress or on-going worry about finances, disagreement within family or with friends, health etc may trigger the anxiety.

Daily stressors like traffic jams or missing your train or flight can cause anyone anxiety. But long-term or chronic stress can lead to long-term anxiety and worsening symptoms, as well as other health problems.

Stress can also lead to behaviours like skipping meals, drinking alcohol, or not getting enough sleep.

In the short term, anxiety increases your breathing and heart rate. This very physical response is preparing you to face an intense situation.

Anxiety attacks usually peak within 10 minutes, and they rarely last more than 30 minutes. But during that short time, you may experience terror so severe that you feel as if you’re about to die or totally lose control.

GENERALISED ANXIETY DISORDERS

Based on my study, given below are the Generalised Anxiety Disorders:-

· Excessive anxiety and worry (apprehensive expectation), occurring frequently for days, weeks and months, about a number of events or activities. It can be related to work or health or Enviroment related issues.

· The person finds it difficult to control the worry.

· The anxiety and worry are associated with symptoms like

. Restlessness

. Being easily fatigued

. Difficulty concentrating or mind going blank

. Increased Irritability

. Muscle tension

. Sleep disturbance (difficulty falling or staying asleep, or restless unsatisfying sleep)

All these symptoms or disorders at are experienced by one and all at some point or the other. Just imagine the mind set of people who have to perform tasks which are legally risky like an operation done by doctors or a landing by a new pilot or a last over of a match which needs 10 runs to win with the last batsman at the crease. These are absolutely anxious and stressful moments. How they are managed and handled, will define the person and his personality.

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ANXIETY AN ANXIETY DISORDERS

Knowing the difference between normal feelings of anxiety and an anxiety disorder and whether requiring self-care or medical attention can help a person identify and treat the condition, accordingly.

Anxiety is a problem when it becomes overwhelming or unmanageable and it comes up unexpectedly. Anxiety itself is not a medical condition but a natural emotion that is vital for survival when an individual finds themselves facing danger.

Anxiety disorders are mental illnesses that have a big impact your life. People may avoid going about their daily lives in order to avoid anxiety. An anxiety disorder develops when this reaction becomes exaggerated or out-of-proportion to the trigger that causes it.

While anxiety can cause distress, it is not always a medical condition.

BEST TECHNIQUES TO MANAGE ANXIETY

While for Anxiety Disorders, I strongly recommend counselling the medical professional, for Anxiety Management, I am happy to share with you all, various Anxiety Management Techniques:-

For better understanding, I have divided these techniques into three Parts:

· the Physical Provocation that constitutes the terror of panic

· the ‘Wired’ Feelings of tension that correlated with being ‘stressed out’

· the Mental Anguish of Reflection — a brain that won’t stop thinking distressing thoughts

Part One: Physical Provocation

Distressing Physical Provocation — sympathetic arousal causes the heart thumping, pulse-racing, dizzy, tingly, shortness of breath physical symptoms, that can come out of the blue and are intolerable when not understood. Even high levels of anxiety can cause physical tension in the jaw, neck and back as well as an emotional somatic feeling of doom or dread in the pit of the stomach, which will set off a mental search for what might be causing it.

Method 1: Manage the body.

· Eat right

· Avoid alcohol, nicotine, sugar and caffeine

· Exercise

· On-going self-care

· Sleep

· Consider hormonal changes

Method 2: Breathe

Breathing will slow down or stop the stress response. Do the conscious, deep breathing for about 1 minute at a time, 10–15 times per day every time you are waiting for something eg., the phone to ring, an appointment, the kettle to boil, waiting in a line etc.

Method 3: Mindful Awareness

· Close your eyes and breathe; noticing the body, how the intake of air feels, how the heart beats, what sensations you can feel in the gut etc

· With eyes still closed, purposefully shift your awareness away from your body to everything you can hear or smell or feel through your skin

· Shift awareness back and forth from your body to what’s going on around you

You will learn in a physical way as to what aspects of the world you can control– internal or external –you’ll notice, giving you an internal focus and control and learning that when you can ignore physical sensations, you can stop making the catastrophic interpretations that bring on panic or worry. It allows you to feel more in control and mindful of the present.

Part Two: Tension, Stress and Dread

Many people with anxiety search frantically for the reasons behind their symptoms in the hope that they can ‘solve’ whatever problem it is.

But since much of their heightened tension isn’t about a real problem, they are wasting their time running around an inner web of perpetual worry. Even if the tension stems from psychological or other causes, there are ways to eliminate the symptoms of worry. These methods are most helpful for diminishing chronic tension.

Method 4: Don’t listen when worry calls your name

This feeling of dread and tension comprises a state of low grade fear, which can also cause other physical symptoms, like headache, joint pain and ulcers. The feeling of dread is just the emotional manifestation of physical tension.

You must first learn that worry is a habit with a neurobiological underpinning. Then apply relaxation to counteract the tension that is building up.

This ‘Don’t Listen’ method decreases the tension by combining a decision to ignore the voice of worry with a cue for the relaxation state.

To stop listening to the command to worry, you can say to yourself: “Its just my anxious brain firing wrong”. This is the cue to begin relaxation breathing which will stop the physical sensations of dread that trigger the radar.

Method 5: Knowing, Not Showing, Anger

When you fear anger because of past experience, the very feeling of anger, even though it remains unconscious, can produce anxiety. To know you’re angry doesn’t require you to show you’re angry.

A simple technique: Next time you feel stricken with anxiety, you should sit down and write as many answers as possible to this question,

“If I were angry, what might I be angry about?”

Restrict answers to single words or brief phrases.

This may open the door to get some insight into the connection between your anger and your anxiety.

Method 6: Have a Little Fun

Laughing is a great way to increase good feelings and discharge tension. Getting in touch with fun and play isn’t easy for the serious, tense worrier.

A therapy goal could be simply to relearn what you had fun doing in the past and prescribe yourself some fun.

Part Three: The Mental Anguish of Reflection

These methods deal with the difficult problem of a brain that won’t stop thinking about distressing thoughts or where worry suffocates your mental and emotional life. These worries hum along in the background, generating tension or sick feelings, destroying concentration and diminishing the capacity to pay attention to the good things in life.

Therapy does not need to focus on any specific worry, but rather on the act of worrying itself — the following methods are the most effective in eliminating rumination or reflection.

Method 7: Turning it Off

If a reflecting brain is like an engine stuck in gear and overheating, then slowing or stopping it, gives it a chance to cool off. The goal of ‘turning it off’ is to give the ruminative mind a chance to rest and calm down.

Sit quietly with eyes closed and focus on an image of an open container ready to receive every issue on your mind. See and name each issue or worry and imagine putting it into the container. When no more issues come to mind, ‘put a lid’ on the container and place it on a shelf or in some other out of the way place until you need to go back to get something from it. Once you have the container on the shelf, you invite into the space that is left in your mind whatever is the most important current thought or feeling.

At night, right before sleep, invite a peaceful thought to focus on while drifting off.

Method 8: Persistent Interruption of Reflection

Reflective worry has a life of its own, consistently interfering with every other thought in your mind. The key to changing this pattern is to be persistent with your attempts to use thought stopping and thought replacement. It’s important to attempt to interrupt the pattern every time you catch yourself reflecting — you’ve spent a long time establishing this pattern and it will take persistence to wear it down.

Thought stopping — use the command “Stop” and/or a visual image to remind yourself that you are going into an old habit. The command serves as a punishment and a distractor.

Thought replacement — substitute a reassuring, assertive or self-accepting statement after you have managed to stop the thought. You may need to develop a set of these statements that you can look at or recall from memory.

Method 9: Worry Well, but Only Once

Some worries just have to be faced head-on, and worrying about them the right way can help eliminate secondary, unnecessary worrying. When you feel that your worries are out of control try this next method:

1. Worry through all the issues within a time limit of 10–20 mins and cover all the bases

2. Do anything that must be done at the present time. Set a time when it’ll be necessary to think about the worry again.

3. Write that time on a calendar.

4. Whenever the thought pops up again say, “Stop! I already worried” and divert your thoughts as quickly as possible to another activity — you may need to make a list of these possible diversions beforehand.

Method 10: Learn to Plan Instead of Worry

A big difference between planning and worrying is that a good plan doesn’t need constant review. An anxious brain, however, will reconsider a plan over and over to be sure it’s the right plan. This is all just ruminating worry disguising itself as making a plan and then seeking constant reassurance.

It is important to learn the fundamentals of planning as it can make a big difference in calming a ruminative mind. These include:

1. Concretely identifying the problem

2. Listing the problem solving options

3. Picking one of the options

4. Writing out a plan of action

To be successful in this approach, you must also have learned to apply the thought-stopping/thought-replacing tools or you can turn planning into endless cycles of re-planning.

Once a plan has been made you can use the fact that you have the plan as a concrete reassurance to prevent the round-robin of ruminative re-planning.

The plan becomes part of the thought-stopping statement, “Stop! I have a plan!” It also helps the endless reassurance-seeking, because it provides written solutions even to problems the ruminator considers hopelessly complex.

CONCLUSION

These skills do require patience and determination. However, once learnt, people gain a lasting sense of their own power and competence in working actively with their own symptoms to conquer anxiety through their own efforts.