This One Thing Is Surprisingly So Common!

Photo credit: bigstock.com

Photo credit: bigstock.com

This has a terribly negative effect on your health since your body sees anxiety the same way it sees fear; it evokes that “fight/flight/freeze” emotion as a means of protection. This triggers stress hormones that help you respond in an emergency. When the brain sees an uncertain situation that it cannot determine, the anxiety prone person responds by either fighting it or avoiding it. Most people choose avoiding it and when anxiety prone people are in this “avoidance mode”, they tend to tell others what to do, no matter how ridiculous, no matter how inappropriate this might be.

Think you are stuck being an anxiety-prone person? Do you feel stuck in that “avoidance” mode? There is a third option.

Practice one of the following three strategic options to ease feelings of anxiety.

 

1. Emotional Freedom Technique

Although no one can remove all anxiety from their lives, there are energy psychology tolls that help you address your anxiety and panic attacks. This one is called the Emotional Freedom Technique, or EFT. This works by correcting the bioelectrical short circuit that happens when anxiety becomes chronic. Chronic anxiety can cause you to constantly look for potential threats in everything, no matter how mundane the situation, no matter how safe this situation was to you in the past, your brain becomes hardwired to look for the bad.

 

2. Learn to Manage It

If you think your anxiety isn’t “that bad,” you can try to find ways to deal with your anxiety attacks or OCD behavior as it occurs. The idea here is to experience some level of uncertainty and realize that you can live with it. It might not be fun or pleasant, but you learn that you can live through the situation. For example, if you check your stock market accounts three or more times each day, worried that some drop in the market is going to negatively affect you, you might try to limit yourself by looking just twice each day, for beginners. Then just once each day. Then every other day. This gradual acceptance and change teaches your brain that looking at your stocks every other day is just fine; there is no threat and nothing horrible happened.

 

3. Practice Meditation

This sounds too simple to work, but it does. Mindfulness, in particular, appears to help people who suffer from GAD. This is a practice of single-tasking. Focusing solely on one task. You don’t want to think about all those “what ifs” that cause so many people to feel anxiety. You know, the “What if I do this wrong? What if I don’t finish on time? What if the boss doesn’t like this? What if I am late? What if I run out of gas, wreck the car, end up in the hospital, who is going to take care of my kids and how am I going to pay the bills and what if the other party doesn’t have insurance?” You get the idea here. Mindfulness, looking just at what you are doing right now, works because there is really nothing uncertain in the RIGHT NOW, correct? You know what you are doing, you know where you are going, and that’s it. This can help to reduce anxiety but takes some practice to master. One study found that anxiety prone people who took part in mindful mediation were able to shrink that part of the brain which is responsible for feelings of anxiety.

 

READ ALSO: The Real Causes Behind Depression And Other Mood Disorders

 

If you practice some of these steps but find that you simply cannot control your feelings of anxiety, see your doctor or a therapist to find the deeper root of your problem.

References:

www.samhsa.gov

www.npr.org

Video:  www.youtube.com

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