- Do you feel that you are on the verge of losing control, cracking up or going crazy?
- Are you worrying so much that you believe the worrying will cause you harm, are you worrying about worry?
- Do you constantly feel vulnerable and fear that something terrible is about to happen?
- Are you afraid of looking foolish or inadequate in front of other’s?
If you have answered yes to any of the above then it’s probably time that you addressed your anxiety and made change.
What is anxiety and Stress?.
It maybe so that Depression is considered the common cold of mental health, but anxiety and stress in degrees, are as common as breathing. By design our survival mechanism, which elicits the feeling of anxiety, stress, and the sensations that prompt fight, flight and freeze or submission, has been a primary reason the human species has survived to this day, and so it is important to understand that anxiety the feeling is neither good nor bad, it just is.
Besides mental health conditions that are diagnosed as being actual physical brain damage, anxiety and stress are a response to a believed threat, that is, a fearful evaluation of either an internal or an external event, which is labeled as dangerous to the persons physical or psychological safety.
People often say I am stressed because of my job, do they mean they are tired, or exhausted from working long hours, or are they worrying about the negative consequences of not meeting deadlines and / or the bosses opinion of their efforts.
The first examples suggest that the person may be tried and possibly physically burned out, and needs to manage time and the working environment in a more helpful way. The second suggests more than working long hours as a cause of stress, and is coupled with worrying about the possibility of a catastrophic outcome, which they fear will reflect negatively on their value, and safety.
The concept of anxiety used to be, that the feeling and associated physical sensations had a mind of their own. We now know that the survival response is activated when we set off an internal alarm when a situation, event or trigger is presented that we believe will harm us. Often the threat is to our self-esteem or we believe we are losing control. An evolutionary outcome is that ‘nature’ (the survival response, and to personify) has no idea what is a real objective threat or one that is subjective. Nature just wants to help us survive and when we tell ourselves ‘something is dangerous’ even if in reality it is not, then a part of our brain does it’s job, and activates the survival response and unquestioningly follows our instruction because it is suppose to, this concept is often a surprise people.
While growing up in our environment, our parents usually tried to teach us the basic fundamentals about how to survive. We learned how to eat (but not out of the rubbish bin); we learned how to drink when thirsty (but not from the gutter); we learned how to make ourselves comfortable when we need to sleep, we go to bed to sleep (not in a unsafe place) but when we get stressed or anxious were are not taught how to manage that part of us that generates anxiety other than at times to use of alcohol, binge eating, withdrawal, medication et
c, anything to quickly turn off or reduce the anxiety. In the main our western culture has for generations, not known how to work with anxiety because they did not understand the connection between our cognitions (beliefs, thinking), and our survival response (anxiety).
Cognitive therapy enables you to greatly reduce your anxiety by reducing your fear; this is achieved with cognitive restructuring and exposure exercises. CBT is not positive thinking or a trick, nor is the therapist trying to reinvent the wheel as it were; in therapy we will be using the same mechanism that you have been using throughout your life, that is, your own idiosyncratic meaning giving process which you use to navigate your world.
