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Anxiety

Anxiety is an emotion characterised by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil, often accompanied by nervous behaviour like pacing, somatic complaints, and rumination. It typically involves feelings of apprehension about future events, marked by “what-if” worries. While it can present with physical symptoms such as muscle tension, heart palpitations, sweating, dizziness, and shortness of breath, and emotional symptoms like restlessness or a sense of impending doom, anxiety is a natural and essential human experience. It serves a vital function by helping us to look ahead, organise ourselves, and gather the energy needed to get things done.

The main strategies for helping to relieve anxiety often involve changing one’s relationship with it rather than trying to eliminate it completely:

  • Mindfulness and Acceptance: This approach encourages facing anxiety, rather than avoiding or controlling it, by paying attention to the present moment without judgment. Techniques include deep, belly breathing to instantly calm the brain and body, observing thoughts without getting caught in their content, and willingness to experience anxious feelings as they are.
  • Lifestyle Adjustments: Regular physical exercise can significantly reduce anxiety by improving blood flow and balancing hormones. Ensuring adequate sleep is also crucial, as lack of it can exacerbate anxiety. A balanced diet, avoiding stimulants like caffeine and refined sugars, and focusing on complex carbohydrates, can also promote calmer moods.
  • Cognitive Strategies: This involves challenging anxious thoughts by questioning their validity and reframing negative interpretations of situations. Identifying specific triggers that provoke anxiety is a key step. Sometimes, simply writing down worries can help to gain clarity and reduce their power.
  • Behavioural Exposure: Gradually facing feared situations or internal sensations teaches the brain that these are not dangerous, which can reduce the anxiety response over time. This builds confidence and tolerance for discomfort.
  • Havening Techniques: These involve applying gentle self-touch (to the arms, face, or hands) while recalling a distressing memory or feeling. This touch, combined with distractions like counting or humming, can help to reduce distress and build resilience.

How can relaxation techniques reduce anxiety?

Treating burnout, a state of exhaustion from chronic stress, involves addressing its causes and connections to anxiety and trauma. Central to how to treat burnout is improving sleep quality, as adequate rest calms the nervous system and supports brain function essential for recovery, while poor sleep exacerbates symptoms. Quality sleep helps reduce anxiety by calming the amygdala and aiding stress processing. Effective strategies for better sleep include consistent routines, creating a restful environment, winding down before bed, avoiding stimulants, exercising, and managing worries. Supportive modalities like anxiety coaching offer practical stress management tools, while Havening Techniques help process chronic stress and trauma’s impact, contributing to a resilient foundation for recovery.

Finding Your Spark Again: Effective Strategies for Treating Burnout

Burnout is a state of profound emotional and physical exhaustion caused by prolonged stress, distinct from but often overlapping with anxiety and depression. Understanding how to treat burnout involves recognising its varied presentations and its connections to underlying issues like chronic stress and trauma. Effective, long-lasting recovery requires a comprehensive approach focusing on rest, building resilience, setting healthy boundaries, re-engaging with values, and consistent self-care. Supportive modalities like anxiety coaching offer practical strategies for managing stress and anxiety, while Havening Techniques provide a neurobiological approach to process the impact of chronic stress and trauma, helping individuals heal and build a resilient foundation for recovery.

Support for Psychological Distress: Approaches to Overcoming Anxiety and Related Challenges

Summary – anxiety treatment therapy: Many individuals grappling with anxiety are seeking diverse forms of support beyond traditional therapy. While established methods like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) and medication are widely available, challenges such as high dropout rates and a focus on symptom reduction mean they may not suit everyone. Alternative and complementary approaches, including… Read More »Support for Psychological Distress: Approaches to Overcoming Anxiety and Related Challenges

How to manage an anxiety attack

Managing intense anxiety and panic involves shifting from trying to control or eliminate the experience to accepting and allowing it. Key strategies include practicing acceptance, mindfulness, breathing and relaxation techniques, taking action aligned with your values despite anxiety, questioning unhelpful thoughts and beliefs, being compassionate towards yourself, and focusing attention outwards. Experiential exposure, or facing feared situations, is also a core component to teach the brain that these experiences are not dangerous. Ultimately, the goal is to change your relationship with anxiety and learn to function effectively even when it is present.

What is the ACT approach

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), pronounced as “act” rather than spelling out the letters, is a contemporary “third wave” behaviour therapy. It is an empirically grounded process approach built upon the foundations of traditional behaviour therapy and Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT). ACT is an evidence-based intervention supported by decades of research, including over 300 randomized… Read More »What is the ACT approach

The Amygdala’s Role in Anxiety

The amygdala, part of the brain’s limbic system, is a crucial structure for anxiety. It acts as a rapid threat detector, triggering the stress response and fight-or-flight reaction. The amygdala forms emotional memories based on associations, causing triggers to elicit anxiety. It is involved in various anxiety disorders and trauma responses. Although it can override the thinking brain, the amygdala learns from experience and can be rewired through exposure, relaxation, breathing techniques, exercise, sleep, and mindfulness, allowing for more effective anxiety management.

How to Stop Anxiety’s Grip

Stopping the disabling effects of anxiety, while acknowledging its natural presence, is achievable through various self-help methods and, when needed, professional support. Key self-help strategies include employing physiological techniques like deep breathing and relaxation to calm the body, and engaging in exercise. Mental approaches involve using mindfulness to manage focus, questioning anxious thoughts, and employing distraction. Behaviourally, actively facing fears through methods like graded exposure and stopping avoidance behaviours are crucial. Lifestyle changes, such as improving sleep and diet and reducing stressors, contribute to resilience. Tracking anxiety patterns through journaling and focusing on progress and strengths also aids in the process. For severe, complex, or persistent anxiety that doesn’t improve with self-help, seeking professional help from qualified practitioners is a valuable and courageous step towards regaining control and significantly stopping anxiety’s negative impact on life.

Choosing the Right Path with Havening for Anxiety

Understanding when and how to use Havening for anxiety involves considering the nature of the anxiety and the goals of intervention. Havening is described as a method that can depotentiate traumatically encoded experiences in the amygdala. The amygdala is a brain region involved in processing emotional reactions and the fight-or-flight response. Some types of anxiety… Read More »Choosing the Right Path with Havening for Anxiety

Amygdala-Based Anxiety

Amygdala-based anxiety originates in the amygdala, an ancient brain structure focused on protection. It operates rapidly and without conscious awareness, triggering the physical stress response and causing symptoms that can feel sudden and illogical. It is often driven by emotional memories and learned associations, which may not be consciously accessible. It can be distinguished from cortex-based anxiety by its typically unexplained nature, the onset of physical symptoms as a primary sign, and the reduced ability to use logic during intense episodes.

The Amygdala and Anxiety

The recommended approach to begin rewiring the brain to reduce anxiety is to first focus on calming the amygdala using relaxation, sleep, and exercise to reduce sympathetic nervous system activation. Then, identify triggers interfering with life goals and use exposure exercises to modify the amygdala’s response. Practice is essential, as the amygdala learns through experience; some anxiety during exposure is necessary for new connections to form.

Finding Freedom and a Fulfilling Life with Acceptance and Commitment Therapy

Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) for anxiety is an approach that shifts the focus from trying to eliminate or control anxiety symptoms to living a full and meaningful life with anxiety present. It helps you identify how your attempts to avoid uncomfortable internal experiences (thoughts, feelings, sensations) may be limiting your life. Through acceptance, mindfulness, cognitive defusion, clarifying your values, and committing to value-guided action, ACT helps you build psychological flexibility. The goal is to drop the unworkable struggle against anxiety and instead take action that matters to you, allowing your experiences to be as they are.

Dealing with Panic Attacks

Dealing with panic attacks involves understanding their nature as intense, temporary episodes of fear often linked to the fight-or-flight response. Rather than seeking to eliminate them, effective strategies focus on changing your relationship with the panic, learning to manage intense physical sensations and thoughts, and facing feared situations. Key techniques include understanding the physiological basis of panic symptoms, practising acceptance and willingness to experience intense feelings, using mindfulness to stay present, changing the relationship with catastrophic thoughts through techniques like questioning or defusion, learning and practising proper breathing and relaxation techniques outside of panic, gradually exposing yourself to feared symptoms and situations without avoidance, identifying personal triggers, productively shifting focus away from panic, and identifying protective factors and coping skills. While some foundational learning and skill practice can be done independently through self-help resources, working with a therapist is often recommended for implementing exposure strategies and navigating more challenging aspects of dealing with panic attacks. The goal is to gain more control over your response to panic, allowing you to live a fuller life.

Anxiety Attack Management Report

This report outlines strategies for managing anxiety attacks based on information from the sources. It explains that anxiety attacks are temporary exaggerations of the stress response and not harmful. Key immediate actions include breathing techniques, relaxation, focusing on thoughts and sensations without judgment, using distraction, and resisting the urge to flee. Longer-term strategies involve identifying triggers, making plans, writing or journaling, challenging thoughts, adjusting language and reactions, practising self-care, seeking support, building understanding, and being persistent.