WORKING WITH ANXIETY
Anxiety is a normal part of life. It is a very common and useful reaction to new and/or stressful situations. According to the National Institute of Health, anxiety occurrence in the United States increases rapidly in last ten years, especially among young adults, which most likely indicates a global trend worldwide.
However, severe anxiety might cause you to avoid certain places and social situations, like preventing you from speaking up in public. It might worsen your physical health. Or it might manifest itself as acute panic attacks. if your anxiety is persistent, intense, and tends to overwhelm you sometimes to an extent of impacting your decisions, life quality, and daily situations, reaching out for professional support can help you.
Types of anxiety disorders include:
-
Generalized anxiety disorder: recurring and excessive worry about ordinary events in daily situations.
-
Social anxiety disorder: fear and avoidance of social situations, which one associates with embarrassment and possible negative judgement of others.
-
Selective mutism: an inability to speak up in certain situations, which has social, educational and professional impact.
-
Panic attacks: sudden onset of intense anxiety and fear including physical symptoms like heart palpitations or shortness of breath.
-
Specific phobias: anxiety of a certain object or situation (e.g. open or closed spaces, spiders, germs, etc.
Common symptoms of anxiety issues include:
-
Nervousness, restlessness, feeling of impeding danger
-
Trouble concentrating on anything else than the worry, difficulty to control worry
-
Avoiding situations and things that trigger worries
-
Sleep issues
-
Feeling weak, tired, demotivated
-
Physical symptoms, such as hyperventilation, heart palpitations, sweating, digestive issues
However, anxiety is treatable. Mild cases are treatable with talking therapy, and severe cases might require a reference to another specialist. In my practice, I use Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) methodology to work with anxiety.
Anxiety often comes from trying to prevent something terrible from happening — getting fired from your job, failing an exam, or a relationship ending, for example – rather than moving through uncertainty with curiosity and acceptance. Anxiety is an attempt to regain control over what may be beyond our control, which can be painful and challenging. Sometimes, it is healthier to let go off the things that are outside of our realm of control (“hypothetical worries”), and focus on identifying things that are likely to happen and we can change (“real worries”), and defining actions to combat those. Gaining a calmer, more grounded sense of acceptance, distancing and defusing from negative feelings, and learning to differentiate between what to focus on and what to let go off, are things that I can help my clients master within the ACT framework.