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Dealing with anxiety can be a difficult process. If you are feeling anxious, it stands to reason that you want to escape a stressful situation as quickly as possible or make the situation safer. In life-threatening situation, this would be a sensible response that ultimately protects you from harm and is what our natural fight or flight intuition tells us. If you want to get the information about the oil, then you can click at https://www.discovermagazine.com/health/best-cbd-oil-for-anxiety-and-depression site. The recovery from the depression and anxiety is the best one for the individuals. The protection of the mental health is the requirement of the people. The handling of the situations is with the sharp mind.
We now live in a safer World, and the problems that we once faced is that very few situations are truly ‘dangerous’. Dealing with anxiety means taking some form of action. When we start trying to escape or avoid taking action that is when the trouble begins. We need to change this behavior to ‘doing something’ rather than thinking about the problem or internalizing the stress this is dealing with anxiety the correctly.
If we don’t do something, we set ourselves up for yet another vicious cycle in which the more we avoid action, the more we reinforce the idea that there really is something to fear. Taking action in your situation is dealing with anxiety.
Over time, inaction leads to us to us becoming more and more scared of things. Worse, we rarely stop long enough to find out that the initial situation was never that bad in the first place. This avoidance is just one of what we call ‘safety behaviors’ and these are often used in social situations such as parties. Dealing with anxiety is daily action taking to improve our situation to relieve us from stress.
Here, in social situations, anxiety sufferers might avoid talking or stick close to friends or a partner. They might also drink too much or busy themselves taking coats or handing round food rather than mixing with other party-goers. Dealing with anxiety is stepping up to this challenge and tackling it head on.
Avoiding anxiety-provoking situations in this way, or using ‘safety behaviors’ to control anxiety, might seem to solve the problem in the short term. In the long term, however, the more you use these strategies, the more your fear grows. Each time you avoid a situation or use a safety behavior, you send a negative message to yourself. Dealing with anxiety needs you to realize that the situation is not as bad as you think and that repeatedly avoiding situations makes the problem much worse.
Dealing with anxiety then requires you to eliminate anxiety behaviors in the long term. Therefore, it is important to break this negative pattern as soon as possible. The first step towards this is to work out what situations you are avoiding and whether you are using ‘safety behaviors’.
To do this you must ask yourself the following questions and write them down:
Which situations do I avoid because they make me anxious?
Do I ever escape from a situation or activity because I feel anxious? If so, what kinds of situations are these?
Do I have behavioral tricks I use to make me feel more comfortable in situations that make me anxious? If so, what behavioral tricks do I use?
Read through your answers and now make two lists:
Things you have been avoiding that you would like to start doing. Safety behaviors you have been using that you would like to eliminate from your life.
Dealing With Anxiety: Stepping up
Now extend your thinking by asking yourself ‘why?’
Very often people avoid or escape situations because they think something will go wrong. They might imagine that they will embarrass themselves at a party or that they will say something stupid and everyone will laugh.
We tend to use ‘safety behaviors’ because we think we will be able to prevent something like this happening. The person who imagines they will say something stupid will simply not talk while the person who believes they will embarrass themselves at a party might simply not go or may stay close to a friend or partner all evening.
By questioning why you have these beliefs and writing down your answers you can begin to spot your own safety behaviors. You can then in turn start to examine whether these are justified. Using safety behaviors means that you never give yourself the chance to find out if these are based on the truth or not.
If, however, you challenge yourself to face a situation and get rid of those safety behaviors, you can find out the truth – which, more often than not, is far better than you expected. This process can help you to think about things in a more realistic, balanced way and to reduce your overall anxiety in the long term.
All you need do is use the same thought-challenging strategy you learned earlier in this book. Write down one of your anxious thoughts that relate to your safety behaviors and examine the evidence for and against. Repeat this process for each of your anxious thoughts.
Dealing with Anxiety: Eliminating Safety Behaviors
Now that you have adopted more realistic thoughts about your anxieties by carrying out the thought-challenging process, you need to test those thoughts by doing the things you have been avoiding and gradually reducing and eventually eliminating your safety behaviors.
You can do this with the help of the following tips:
Don’t worry if you feel anxious when you first face a difficult situation – this is entirely normal and to be expected.
Take your time and work at your own pace. Start with baby steps and work up to the really scary situations that you have been purposefully avoiding.
Drop your safety behaviors one at a time rather than trying to get rid of them all at once. This may take longer but will be easier for you to work through.
Don’t expect your anxiety to disappear immediately – it will take time for you to adjust your behaviors and to absorb this adjustment. The longer you manage to stay in a previously anxiety-provoking situation, the likelier it is that your anxiety will be reduced.
Don’t expect all your anxiety to disappear the moment you have experienced a previously difficult situation or dropped a safety behavior. The longer you have been avoiding that situation or using that behavior, the longer it will take for you to get rid of your anxiety completely. Repetition is important here – the more you practice, the less anxious you will feel.
