Treating Anxiety

“What l liked about distraction as a means for treating anxiety was its simplicity. Instead of dwelling on my worries and feeling worse and worse, I learnt to switch off from them. With practice, I became more efficient at treating anxiety and I found that I could do this in almost any situation. Furthermore, I discovered that nothing terrible happened if I didn’t worry and that I’d been wasting such a tot of time, in the past, fretting about things.”

In this article I want to focus on strategies for treating anxiety by keeping psychological aspects of worry, fear and anxiety under control. This means addressing the worrying thoughts and images which are associated with distress. Sometimes these are easily identified; sometimes you might simply be aware of feeling fear or anxiety and it will have seemed to come out of the blue.

What Triggers Psychological Symptoms?

When looking for a specific anxiety treatment, sometimes it is difficult to articulate what is going through your mind because the link is so well established that the reaction seems to happen automatically. This can apply to pleasant or to stressful reactions. A pleasant automatic response might occur as you walked by a bonfire or smelt old paint and felt contented without realizing why.

If you thought about it you might discover that this was because the smells reminded you of happy childhood experiences of firework displays or helping your grandpa in the shed. Even when the automatic response is a stress reaction, it is often no bad thing: when a car comes round the comer too quickly, you jump out of the way; if a child looks as though he is about to stumble into a fire, you grab him. There is a chain of reasoning behind such actions; but it becomes so well established that it is almost as if we short-circuit the conscious thinking process and thus save precious time in dangerous situations.

This ‘short-circuiting’ can underpin problem anxiety, too, and make treating anxiety seem like a never ending battle. Imagine a woman who is happily walking round a church filled with flowers. She suddenly has a surge of anxiety and feels compelled to flee from the church, which spoils her enjoyment.

Later, she realizes that her feelings of distress were triggered because she smelled chrysanthemums, which took her back to childhood when she was terrified of her piano teacher who always had a pot of them on the piano. On this occasion she ‘short-circuited’ the reasoning process and suffered inappropriate feelings of distress.

When looking at ways of treating anxiety in this way, we know that cycles of worrying thoughts and increasing anxiety can develop which will keep tensions high. For example, at a party, symptoms of anxiety such as blushing or not being able to speak easily would cause more worry and increase stress and social worries. A cycle of social anxiety could develop.

If the situation were one where someone had a slight chest pain and thought “this could be a heart attack!” stress levels would rise and the person would experience symptoms such as increased muscular tension, which would worsen the pain, and so the thoughts might become even more alarming: This is a heart attack!’ The anxiety would get worse and a cycle of increasing tension would develop.

Whether or not you can put your finger on the mental component, alarming thoughts or images keep anxiety going and the symptoms of anxiety maintain the alarming thoughts.

There are, however, two ways of breaking me cycles of worrying thoughts and treating anxiety of this kind: distraction, which refocuses attention away from the cycle, and challenging, which helps rationalize exaggerated worries.

Using Distraction For Treating Anxiety

It is possible to concentrate on only one thing at once, so when you turn your attention to something which is neutral or pleasant, you can distract yourself from worrying thoughts and images. By using specific techniques of distraction, you can break the cycle of worrying thoughts and prevent your anxiety increasing.

There are three basic distraction techniques that can be used for treating anxiety which you can tailor to suit your needs. These are: physical exercise, refocusing; and mental exercise. The key to successful distraction lies in finding something which needs a great deal of attention, is very specific, and holds some interest for you. If a distraction task is too simple, too vague or too boring, it tends not to be effective.

Treating Anxiety With Distraction Part 2

Tagged as: anxiety treatment