How to deal with anxiety.

Anxiety problems are now the most common behavioral health complaint in America having surpassed depression for the first time. There are many ideas about why this might be the case, though there certainly is no single cause. An important thing to remember is that if you are feeling overwhelmed with stress or anxiety, are changing your daily routines or habits to avoid feeling anxious and/or missing important events with friends or family, then you are certainly not alone. Anxiety symptoms are very familiar to us all because humans have a part of their nervous system called the sympathetic nervous system and a hormone called adrenaline that is specifically designed to generate a series of biological changes to improve our odds of survival when threatened. Our problem is that we are rarely physically threatened, but our mind hasn’t adapted to this reality and continues to raise the alarm, increasing our heart rate, quickening our respiration, slowing digestion, cooling our hands, and speeding up our thoughts.

Many people would like to stop feeling anxious and seek to “get rid” of anxiety. This is like trying to live without feeling pain. Discomfort and pain are part of being alive. As long as our nervous system is functioning, we are going to feel anxious at times and our mind is going to alert us to potential threats. A more realistic goal then is to effectively deal with anxious thoughts, feelings and sensations so the experience of anxiety does not distract us from living the life we’d like to live and being the people we want to be. We are better off acknowledging the experience of anxiety and learning strategies to refocus our thoughts and actions. There are some specific skills, such as mindfulness, breathing retrainment, and cognitive and behavioral modification, to improve how you deal with anxiety and the counselors working in Hope Community Counseling Center would love to help you learn them. If you or a loved one are dealing with levels of anxiety that are creating unneeded or unhelpful stress in your life, contact us today to learn more about how we can help.