Skip to content
Home » exposure

exposure

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.

Workplace Anxiety: Strategies and Support

Anxiety about work is a common experience driven by how we interpret and respond to work-related situations, often involving excessive focus on future problems and attempts to control the uncontrollable. Effective self-help strategies include developing awareness of triggers, practising acceptance and mindfulness, gradually facing feared work situations through exposure, reinterpreting anxious thoughts, using relaxation and breathing techniques, and writing down worries. When workplace anxiety is severe, professional help is available. An anxiety coach can provide guidance on tackling avoidance and managing internal states. An anxiety therapist offers structured treatment to understand and modify responses to anxiety. For extreme anxiety or that linked to trauma, a Havening practitioner may provide help, including processing experiences without detailed verbal disclosure. Managing anxiety about work involves understanding its mechanisms, employing targeted techniques, and seeking appropriate professional support when necessary.

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.

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.

ACT or CBT for anxiety?

ACT and CBT offer distinct approaches to addressing anxiety. CBT often focuses on identifying and challenging maladaptive thoughts and reducing symptoms by altering thought content and structure. It also utilises exposure to counter avoidance. ACT, conversely, views avoidance and control efforts as key problems that paradoxically worsen suffering. Its goal is not symptom reduction but helping clients live a full, valued life by fostering psychological flexibility. ACT employs defusion to change the relationship with thoughts rather than disputing them and promotes acceptance and willingness to experience internal sensations and emotions fully, often using mindfulness and exposure techniques reframed within an acceptance context. While CBT is seen as a traditional behavioural/cognitive approach, ACT is considered a newer wave that integrates some CBT techniques within a broader framework centred on acceptance, mindfulness, values, and committed action.

Navigating Panic Attack Help

Help for panic attacks involves understanding their nature as temporary, non-dangerous physical reactions. Professional guidance can be beneficial, especially after ruling out physical causes. Self-help strategies include facing feared situations or symptoms directly without avoidance, employing specific breathing techniques for calm (though not as a way to stop an attack), actively challenging unhelpful thoughts and beliefs, shifting focus away from internal sensations and catastrophic thinking, cultivating acceptance and self-compassion, adopting healthy lifestyle habits like avoiding stimulants and practising relaxation, and using tools like journaling or worksheets to track experiences and identify patterns. The core is often learning not to react with fear or avoidance to the sensations and thoughts associated with panic.

Strategies for Managing Anxiety in the Workplace

Dealing with anxiety at work involves moving beyond trying to control or avoid it, which is often unworkable in the long term and can make things worse. Instead, it encourages understanding anxiety as a natural part of the human experience and, in some ways, a helpful signal. Key steps include identifying avoidance patterns at work and their costs, and consciously shifting your relationship with anxiety towards acceptance and willingness to experience it. Practical strategies involve pinpointing anxiety triggers, practising assertiveness, incorporating mindfulness and exposure techniques, using writing to organise thoughts, and adopting helpful lifestyle changes. Addressing underlying issues like shame or unresolved anger is also important. Seeking professional support can provide invaluable guidance and tailored approaches for navigating workplace anxiety effectively, allowing you to live a life guided by your values rather than controlled by fear.

Workplace Stress and Anxiety

Workplace stress and anxiety are common, arising from factors like workload, relationships, uncertainty, and limiting beliefs. Symptoms can range from physical discomfort to avoidance and reduced productivity. Effective management involves awareness, assertiveness, boundary setting, problem-solving, mindfulness, exposure, emotional and thought management, self-care, and improved communication, aimed at transforming potentially destabilizing anxiety into energy that supports productive work and well-being.

Managing Anxiety Related to Work

Reducing work-related anxiety involves a multifaceted approach that includes shifting your mindset, accepting your feelings, practising mindfulness, challenging negative thoughts, gradually facing fears, setting boundaries, addressing root causes, cultivating self-compassion, engaging in relaxation techniques, prioritising well-being, taking action, consciously questioning anxieties, reducing avoidance, focusing on solutions, accepting feelings, and clarifying values.

Embracing Experience: Understanding and Moving Beyond Avoidance

Experiential avoidance, the attempt to evade unwanted inner experiences, plays a significant role in various mental health challenges, including anxiety, depression, stress, and trauma, leading to restricted lives and intensified distress. Overcoming this pattern involves cultivating awareness, acceptance, willingness, cognitive defusion, present moment contact, value clarification, gradual exposure, and self-compassion, enabling individuals to engage with a full range of experiences and move towards a more fulfilling life.

Guiding You Through Social Fears: The Role of a Social Anxiety Coach

A social anxiety coach helps individuals manage social anxiety by understanding their triggers, setting goals, developing coping strategies and social skills, creating action plans for exposure, challenging negative thinking, overcoming avoidance, building confidence, focusing on solutions, and providing support and accountability.

Social Anxiety with Therapeutic Support

A social anxiety therapist specialises in helping individuals overcome intense social fear and avoidance. This requires an approach that directly addresses the anticipation, experience, and rumination associated with social interactions, focusing on changing one’s relationship with social discomfort. Therapists use various techniques such as psychoeducation, exposure exercises, social skills training, and sometimes solution-focused or acceptance-based strategies. They tailor their interventions to the client’s stage of change, supporting them from awareness to action and maintenance. Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) provides a framework that helps clients accept anxious feelings, defuse from negative thoughts, be present, recognise a broader sense of self, connect with their values, and take committed action in social situations despite their anxiety.