Fighting Anxiety
Tips for Fighting Anxiety
Many of the ways of fighting anxiety are indirect. Rather than deal head on with the manifestations of anxiety you deal with some of the root causes. This manner of dealing with anxiety acknowledges that it is not a disease but the symptoms of an underlying condition.
Get Help
The first step in fighting anxiety is getting help. You can probably find several mental health professionals in your area that deal specifically with anxiety disorders. Such a professional can help you develop strategies for dealing with your anxiety. What follows outlines some of these strategies.
Anxiety Awareness
One of the key strategies for fighting anxiety is identifying your triggers. A trigger is the catalyst that sets your anxiety going. If you get anxiety attacks, you have probably noticed that they happen under certain situations. You might get anxiety, for example, when at a party or all alone or even in reaction to a particular sound.
Often the trigger can tell you a lot about the type of anxiety you have. There are six main types of anxiety disorder, each with there own particular manifestations. For example, social anxiety disorder happens to people who fear being around other people and interacting with them. Separation anxiety, on the hand, is a fear of being left alone. (It usually happens with kids.)
The kind of anxiety that has been in the news a lot lately is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Veterans offer suffer from this and describe it as “flashbacks”. In fact, however, what is happening to veterans when they suffer an anxiety attack is that some stimulus, like a car backfiring has reminded them of the war zone and this association acts as a trigger for their anxiety attacks.
Recognizing your triggers can help you deal with your attacks.
Relaxation Techniques
Once you are aware of your triggers, you can then prepare yourself to practice relaxation techniques that will moderate your anxiety. For example, if you have social anxiety disorder and you know that being around groups of people is what sets you off, you can start doing your deep breathing on your way to the party.
If you have a full-fledged anxiety attack, you can also learn how to come out of it through the same breathing methods.
Medication
If your anxiety is particularly severe, your psychiatrist may prescribe certain medications to help in fighting anxiety. Often these will be anti-depressants since in the vast majority of cases, those who suffer from anxiety also suffer from depression. These medications will typically be a short-term crutch to help you get through the initial stages of the therapy, until you have learned other methods of mitigating your depressions.
Lifestyle Changes
Often, however, what really helps people who suffer from anxiety are lifestyle changes. For example, many people find that getting a good night’s sleep, eating right and exercising regularly really help reduce anxiety. This is because many aspects of anxiety have to do with excess energy that you have not properly purged from your system. When you exercise, this energy burns off. Lack of sleep, on the other hand, contributes to anxiety because tiredness makes it more difficult for us to control and direct our emotions.
Our diet actually contributes much more to our emotional states than you might at first think. If you suffer from nighttime anxiety and insomnia, for example, reducing the amount of caffeine—especially at nighttime—will often have a positive effect on getting you to sleep and on your nerves. Alcohol on the other hand, has a similar effect to lack of sleep, making it harder to control and direct negative emotional energy.
Therefore, if anxiety is a problem in your life, you should start looking for help today, so that you can start living your new, anxiety-controlled life.