Are You Anxious About Your Anxiety - The Activation of Core Schemas

Excessive anxiety is troublesome.  For many, it can be an immobilizing experience.  Anxiousness can be associated with social avoidance and withdrawal, can be a factor in relationship difficulties, can create painful symptoms, and trigger a need to rehash issues related to our past and future.  Anxiety activates the "fight or flight" response, ramping up our sympathetic nervous system.

The most successful treatment approach to dealing with anxiety is through the application of cognitive therapy since anxiety is a reaction to our thinking, beliefs and underlying schemas about life.  It is usually not our primary anxiousness that creates our distress.  It is our secondary thoughts and feelings - the "anxiety about our anxiety" that intensifies our symptoms.    

Almost everyone experiences anxiety, but not everyone catastrophizes about it.  Let's say you are taking a midterm exam in college.  There are several ways you might respond when you open the test booklet and note that there are numerous questions that you are not prepared to answer.  First, you might respond by saying, "wow, none of these answers look familiar.  I don't remember studying for us- I'm going to flunk this test.  If I fail it, there goes my grade for the semester.  Wait until my parents find out, they will kill me!"  Or and alternative, rational response might be, "Gee, I don't understand these first three questions - that's okay, I'll just take some deep breaths, relax and work on the questions that I am familiar with.  Then I'll go back and tackle the ones I couldn't answer before."  

An individual’s manner of self-talk determines the level of anxiety.  When we "awfulize" about anxiety, it tends to intensify it.  When we respond rationally to our anxiety, we diminish its effect.  Rationally responding to anxious thoughts is critical to minimizing its effect.  

Many people tend to believe that their panic or general anxiety "appear out of the blue."  They may feel confused and perplexed by the sudden emergence of their feelings.  Cognitive therapists view anxious feelings as a byproduct of faulty thinking.  There is no mystery to it.  Teaching others to respond rationally to self-defeating talk is the primary goal of therapy.      

Individuals who experience panic attacks are usually troubled by symptoms such as racing heart, sweating, the fear of dying, hyperventilating and a need to escape social situations.  Helping individuals to manage panic attacks takes understanding and patience.  Assisting people to realize that their panic is time-limited is important.  Since panic tends to take on a life of its own, it is important to address the secondary symptoms or the "panic over the panic."  When people panic, they tend to magnify their symptoms through self-defeating thinking, perpetuating the attack.  Teaching people to relax into their panic is necessary.

The following are some guidelines for those who experience anxiety and panic:

• Anxiety is time-limited.  It is comforting to know that it always diminishes in its impact over time.
• Don't fight with your anxiety.  It only makes things worse.  Lean into your anxiety, embrace it, and it will subside.
• Schedule a "worry time."  Go into a quiet room, relax and try to expose yourself to your anxieties.  Try to bring on your symptoms and you will find that it is difficult to do.
• If you have a tendency to panic, create an exit strategy.  Plan a way to remove yourself from anxious situations to bring relief.
• Refocus your attention away from your anxiety.  For example, when people experience panic attacks that involve a racing heart, I might encourage them to do jumping jacks to demonstrate that there is nothing physically causing their symptoms.  This strategy actually lightens the situation and their symptoms.
• If you are anxious, chunk things down into smaller parts.  People tend to feel overwhelmed when they look at the entire picture.  Rather than clean the entire house, pick a few specific tasks such as shredding a few unnecessary documents.

Stay in the present.  Worrying about your future or history serves no useful purpose.  You can't control it anyway.  CBT emphasizes replacing self-defeating beliefs with more rational ways are responding to stressors.  Identifying goals of therapy, approaching them in a practical manner, and providing homework assignments are significant ingredients to addressing anxiety.