Anxiety and Depression For Dummies by Laura L. Smith PhD

Author:Laura L. Smith, PhD
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2010-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Watching Anxiety Come and Go

In This Chapter

Tracking your anxiety to gain control

Seeing the bright side

Anxiety may feel like it will never go away. Believing that you have no control over it and that stress invades your every waking moment is easy. This chapter helps you to realize that anxiety actually has an ebb and flow. Then we show you how taking a few minutes to write down your feelings each day may discharge a little of your anxiety and possibly improve your health. Finally, we help you understand that progress, like anxiety, ebbs and flows.

Following Your Fears All the Way Down the Line

One of the best early steps that you can take to conquer anxiety is to simply follow it every day in a couple of different ways. Why would you want to do all that? After all, you already know full well that you’re anxious. Watching your worries starts the process of change. You discover important patterns, triggers, and insights into your anxiety.

Observing your anxiety from stem to stern

Observing anxiety fulfills several useful functions:

First, monitoring forces you to be aware of your emotions. Avoiding and running away from troubling emotions only causes them to escalate.

Second, you see that your anxiety goes up and down throughout the day — not quite as upsetting as thinking it rules every moment of your life. You’re also likely to discover that recording your ratings can help you to take charge and feel more in control of what’s going on inside of you.

Finally, keeping track helps you to see how you’re progressing in your efforts to quell your distress. Virginia’s story shows you how.

Virginia complains to her friends that she’s the most nervous person on the planet and that she’s close to a nervous breakdown. Recently, her father had heart surgery and her husband lost his job. Virginia feels completely out of control and says that her anxiety never stops. When her counselor suggests that she start tracking her anxiety, she tells him, “You’ve got to be kidding. I don’t need to do that. I can tell you right now that I’m anxious all the time. There’s no let up.” He urges her to go ahead and try anyway.

Table 4-1 shows what Virginia comes up with in her first week of tracking. On a scale of one to ten — ten being total panic and one being complete calm — Virginia rates the level of anxiety that she experiences at around the same time in the morning, then again in the afternoon, and later in the evening.

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