How Do I Overcome My Anxiety

Put Your Anxiety To Rest

Theres no way to completely cure any anxiety disorder, but the right combination of solutions can provide much-needed relief. In fact, treatment helps most people with anxiety reduce their symptoms enough to regain full control over their daily lives.

If youre ready to put your anxiety disorder to rest for good, we can help. our office in West Los Angeles, California, or to schedule a visit with one of our experienced mental health specialists.

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How To Challenge These Thoughts

During your worry period, challenge your negative thoughts by asking yourself:

• Whats the evidence that the thought is true? That its not true?
• Is there a more positive, realistic way of looking at the situation?
• Whats the probability that what Im scared of will actually happen? If the probability is low, what are some more likely outcomes?
• Is the thought helpful? How will worrying about it help me and how will it hurt me?
• What would I say to a friend who had this worry?

Learning To Be Assertive

Being assertive means communicating your needs, wants, feelings, beliefs and opinions to others in a direct and honest manner without intentionally hurting anyones feelings. A person with an anxiety disorder may have trouble being assertive because they are afraid of conflict or believe they have no right to speak up. However, relating passively to others lowers self-confidence and reinforces anxiety. Learning to behave assertively is central to developing a stronger self-esteem.

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When Is My Anxiety Harmful

Identifying what sort of anxiety youre dealing with can be somewhat challenging because how ones body reacts to perceived danger can be entirely different compared to another person.

Its likely you heard anxiety as a blanket term for that general feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease. Its often a feeling grown in response to an upcoming event that has an uncertain outcome.

Every person deals with it at one time or another, because its part of our brains response to a perceived danger even if that danger isnt real.

That said, there are times anxiety can get serious and turn into anxiety attacks that initially feel manageable and then gradually build up over a few hours.

Learn To Avoid Procrastination

Another way to take control of your stress is to stay on top of your priorities and stop procrastinating.

Procrastination can lead you to act reactively, leaving you scrambling to catch up. This can cause stress, which negatively affects your health and sleep quality .

Get in the habit of making a to-do list organized by priority. Give yourself realistic deadlines and work your way down the list.

Work on the things that need to get done today and give yourself chunks of uninterrupted time, as switching between tasks or multitasking can be stressful itself.

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Prioritize what needs to get done and make time for it. Staying on top of your to-do list can help ward off procrastination-related stress.

Yoga has become a popular method of stress relief and exercise among all age groups.

While yoga styles differ, most share a common goal to join your body and mind.

Yoga primarily does this by increasing body and breath awareness.

Some studies have examined yogas effect on mental health. Overall, research has found that yoga can enhance mood and may even be as effective as antidepressant drugs at treating depression and anxiety .

However, many of these studies are limited, and there are still questions about how yoga works to achieve stress reduction.

In general, the benefit of yoga for stress and anxiety seems to be related to its effect on your nervous system and stress response.

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Stop An Anxiety Attack With Belly Breathing

Feeling short of breath is a hallmark symptom of an anxiety attack. But you can make the feeling worse by taking short, shallow breaths. Try belly breathing instead to stop the anxiety attack.

Carbonell compares the type of breathing youll need with the breathing of infants, whose bellies rise and fall with each inhale and exhale. When an anxiety attack starts, exhale deeply, loosen your shoulders, and focus on some longer, deeper inhales and exhales that let your belly rise and fall. Place one hand on your belly if you need to feel this happening.

How People Get Tricked

People’s natural instincts to protect themselves are what lead them to get tricked. See if you recognize your responses in these examples below.

A person with Panic Disorder gets tricked into holding her breath and fleeing the store , rather than shifting to Belly Breathing. and staying there until the feelings pass.

A person with Generalized Anxiety Disorder gets tricked into trying to stop the unwanted “what if?” thoughts, rather than accepting them and taking care of present business as thoughts come and go.

A person with Social Phobia gets tricked into avoiding the party, or hiding in the corner if he attends, rather than say hello to a stranger and see what happens.

A person with OCD gets tricked into repeatedly washing his hands, or returning home to check the stove, rather than accepting the intrusive thoughts of contamination and fire and returning his energies to the present activities at hand.

A person with a dog phobia gets tricked into avoiding the feelings by avoiding all dogs, rather than spending time with a dog until the feelings pass.

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Ways To Deal With Anxiety

Everyone has feelings of anxiety, nervousness, tension, and stress from time to time. Here are 5 ways to help manage them:

Tips For Coping With An Anxiety Disorder

Having occasional feelings of anxiety is a normal part of life, but people with anxiety disorders experience frequent and excessive anxiety, fear, terror and panic in everyday situations. These feelings are unhealthy if they affect your quality of life and prevent you from functioning normally.

Common symptoms of anxiety disorders include:

• Feeling nervous
• A sense of impending panic, danger or doom
• Increased heart rate
• Trembling
• Obsessively thinking about the panic trigger

These feelings of anxiety and panic can interfere with daily activities and be difficult to control. They are out of proportion to the actual danger and can cause you to avoid places or situations.

You should see your health care provider if your anxiety is affecting your life and relationships. Your provider can help rule out any underlying physical health issue before seeing a mental health professional.

While most people with anxiety disorders need psychotherapy or medications to get anxiety under control, lifestyle changes and coping strategies also can make a difference.

Here are 11 tips for coping with an anxiety disorder:

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What Is The Anxiety Trick

The Anxiety Trick is this: You experience Discomfort, and get fooled into treating it like Danger.

What do we do when we’re in danger? We only have three things: Fight, Flight, and Freeze. If it looks weaker than me, I’ll fight it. If it looks stronger than me, but slower, I’ll run away. And if it looks stronger and faster than me, I’ll freeze and hope it doesn’t see so good. That’s all we have for danger.

When people experience the fear of a panic attack, or a phobic encounter, or an obsessive thought, they instinctively treat it as a danger. They try to protect themselves, with some variation of Fight, Flight, or Freeze.

Look For Silver Linings And Be Kind To Yourself

If your social anxiety isnt going away as fast as youd like, thats perfectly normal. It might be that you moved too fast and need to spend more time practicing other social encounters before youre up for the one youre stuck on, or you need to work more on relaxation techniques and distraction techniques so you can tolerate that situation next time, says Dr. Potter.

Analyzing after the fact what triggered a reaction, whether a panic attack or something else, can also help. Try to break down, How can I think about that differently? or How can I change the situation next time? Dr. Potter suggests. Lets say you go to a concert and start to have a panic attack because youre enclosed in by a lot of people. Maybe next time, you might sit in the back or on an aisle, or stay somewhere where you feel like theres an exit route if you feel anxious or closed-in.Dr. Potter adds that other people are generally way more focused on themselves than they are on others. They are most likely not scrutinizing your behavior in social situations, because they are busy thinking about what they are going to say or do next, she says. Your anxiety usually magnifies the negative and minimizes the positive so the things youre acutely aware of about yourself may not be particularly noticeable to others.

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Try Some Aerobic Activity

During periods of anxiety, your body is filled with adrenaline. Putting that adrenaline toward aerobic activity can be a great way to improve your anxiety. Exercise has numerous advantages for controlling your anxiety symptoms:

• Exercise burns away stress hormones that create anxiety symptoms.
• Exercise tires your muscles, reducing excess energy and tension.
• Exercise releases endorphins in your brain which can improve overall mood.
• Exercise is linked to healthier breathing.
• Exercise is a healthy distraction.

Aerobic activity, like light jogging or even fast walking, can be extremely effective at reducing the severity of your anxiety symptoms, as well as the anxiety itself.

Write Down Your Thoughts

Writing down whats making you anxious gets it out of your head and can make it less daunting.

These relaxation tricks are particularly helpful for those who experience anxiety sporadically. They may also work well with someone who has generalized anxiety disorder when theyre in a bind too!

However, if you suspect you have GAD, quick coping methods shouldnt be the only kind of treatment you employ. Youll want to find long-term strategies to help lessen the severity of symptoms and even prevent them from happening.

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Change Your Focus Of Attention

People with health anxiety will often focus on a particular part or function of their body. The more they focus on a part of their body, the more they notice physical sensations which can then trigger worrying thoughts.

These initial thoughts can trigger anxiety, in turn causing additional physical sensations. At this point, the person may begin to believe their anxiety response is further evidence of physical symptoms. You can see how this creates a cycle of worrying. This cycle is known as rumination.

If you feel yourself becoming too focused on a particular worry, its important to redirect your attention to something else. One of the most straightforward ways of accomplishing this is to turn your focus to an activity, such as:

• Cleaning a room
• Painting or drawing
• Going for a hike

Regardless of the activity, the goal is to pay full attention to what you are doing. For example, if youre gardening, notice the sounds around you. Note how your spade feels as it digs into the soil. Listen to the sloshing sounds of the watering can and feel its weight in your hands. By putting our complete attention into a task, we are able to pull our mind away from our worrisome thoughts.

Sometimes, though, this strategy may be less practical. For example, if youre lying in bed trying to sleep but find yourself becoming stuck on a particular worry. In these situations, we can learn to practice mindfulness exercises that will help us to break out of our ruminations.

Try The File It Mind Exercise

The File It technique works particularly well if youre lying awake at night thinking of all the things you have to do or havent done, or if youre rehashing something that happened during the day.

These are the steps for performing this exercise:

The idea with this exercise is that youre taking a moment to name your triggers, examine them, and then consciously put them aside with a deadline to tackle them later. In other words, youre validating your own feelings and making a plan to deal with them, one by one, when its a better time.

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