Understanding and Coping With Anxiety
Anxiety can be used to refer to a number of different problems like phobias, panic attacks, post traumatic stress disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, and generalized anxiety disorder. It can be one of the most upsetting emotions that you can experience. The feelings of nervousness and fear that we go through when facing up to certain challenges in life can also be described as anxiety.
When you are trying to cope with anxiety, you are likely to develop an awareness of the physical symptoms. Like other mental health conditions, such as depression, anxiety can influence four different areas of our lives; namely, our moods, behaviors, physical feelings and our thoughts. These four areas are linked, meaning that the thoughts that we are experiencing can influence our behaviour, moods and physical symptoms; our moods can influence the other areas, and so on.
Significant or traumatic events have a part to play in causing anxiety. Other health problems, bereavement, abuse, accidents and important life changes can lead to anxiety and be difficult to understand and cope with. It has proven to be the case with some individuals that one catastrophic life event has triggered the expectation that other similar events are likely to occur and that they will be unable to cope.
The physical, emotional and thinking changes that we encounter during and anxiety provoking situation are part of our instinctive 'fight or flight' response. Our muscles become tense, our heart begins to race and our breathing speeds up. This could be an appropriate response if you were, for example, preparing to fight off an attacker and it would be equally appropriate if you chose to run away from the attacker. This is why we refer to it as your fight or flight response. It is important to understand when trying to cope with anxiety that this is a normal human response. We need to have this function in place to enable us to take quick action to avoid real threats to our safety. This function can also be activated by situations that don't justify a flight or fight response, such as making a presentation in front of work colleagues or going to the airport. In these scenarios, immediate danger is not present. To deal with anxiety disorder we need to learn how to reduce the anxiety that is triggered by these types of events; events where the flight or fight response is not useful.
Different people perceive potential danger in different ways. Previous experience can lead to insecurity. If you grew up in an unpleasant environment, for example, you may make the conclusion that the world is full of threatening people. This would lead to more frequent feelings of anxiety, whereas an individual may have felt very secure when growing up and as a result they would not perceive as many situations as a potential threat.
Can you identify situations in your life where you have an inappropriate response to danger?
Perhaps the situations that you encounter now that you have grown up don't present the same level of threat as those that you faced during your youth but your reaction is the same. If this is the case then cognitive behavioral therapy could help you to change the way that you perceive conditions around you and help you to understand and cope with your anxiety.
I was glad to see this web site as i have been suffering from depression and anxiety attacks for many years .
Posted by: richard
on: 2009-04-14 09:38:06
i cant sleep and was given pills to relax me by my g.p which i have not yet tryed and i dont want to be independent on them
Posted by: stefano
on: 2009-04-10 01:34:57
this is a great site. Very helpful indeed. i would totally recomend this to anyone with anxiety symptoms/disorder.
Posted by: otik agoraphobic
on: 2009-03-06 21:05:16