Overcoming Anxiety
Here’s some very effective tips for overcoming anxiety. They’re all about using your mind and controlling your thoughts to better manage and control any anxious situation your may find yourself in. These methods are probably some of the best ways of overcoming anxiety that you can use to regain control of your life.
I had always known just what thoughts set off my worrying and feeling miserable, but it had never occurred to me to ask myself if these thoughts were reasonable. When I started to do so, I found that I could challenge most of my worrying thoughts and that took the sting out of them. Sometimes, I enlisted my partner’s help in questioning a negative thought and between us we’ve managed to make life a lot more bearable for both of us.
The challenging technique of overcoming anxiety requires you to recognize a worrying thought and ask yourself. ‘Is this a realistic worry?’ If it isn’t a realistic concern, you need to replace it with a constructive statement. You already know that anxiety causes us to think differently and that we can get caught up in a cycle of worry and increasing anxiety. Challenging, as a treatment for anxiety, is another way of interrupting the cycle of increasing tension by decreasing the impact of the worrying thoughts.
It is not always easy to recognize unrealistic worries and to rationalize them, but the procedure described in this article should help you to develop the anxiety management skill of checking out your automatic thoughts and images. First, however, you must be able to identify anxious thoughts. Your best cue is feeling anxious.
This method of overcoming anxiety is all about being able to notice when you are aware of your tension rising when you are simply ask yourself: “What is going through my mind?’ Your worries may be in the form of sentences, such as ‘I am going to make a fool of myself or ‘I think that I am having a heart attack’, or in the form of a picture, such as a scene where you are losing control or an image of something terrible happening. It is not always easy to recognize worrying thoughts and images, but with practice you will become better able to identify what is going through your mind, and consequently become better at anxiety management.
A very helpful and structured procedure for challenging stressful thoughts and images was developed by an American psychiatrist, Dr Aaron T. Beck, in the 1970s and 1980s. His strategy for overcoming anxiety involves three steps; identifying what is going through your mind; questioning this; and finding a rational alternative.
