Anxiety Toolbox: The Complete Fear-Free Plan. Gloria Thomas
with an ongoing feeling of life being out of control – then you need to begin addressing your anxiety levels. If you don’t, constant worrying will increasingly interfere with your life.
WORRY AND ANXIETY CAN STOP YOU ACHIEVING THE LIFE THAT YOU WANT
Individual Attitudes
Given what I have said about the pressures of modern-day living, you could be forgiven for coming to the conclusion that anxiety is a natural response to the society that we live in. However, your levels of anxiety are very much dependant upon you and how you live your life. The way you perceive and interpret events in your life has a profound effect on your state of mind.
Your anxiety levels are determined to a great extent by the beliefs and assumptions that you have about yourself and the world around you.
Those beliefs influence how you respond and deal with threats and challenges and hence how anxious you become.
Some people seem to ‘wear’ an underlying state of anxiety every day. For others, certain triggers will create anxiety. For others still, anxiety can come about for no reason at all. Your attitude is crucial to how you deal with situations. If you have an optimistic outlook on life, you have empowering beliefs and you deal with situations in a positive way then you are likely to experience less anxiety on the whole. If, in contrast, you have a pessimistic outlook, with limiting beliefs and negative assumptions, then you are more likely to experience anxiety.
Age and Anxiety
Anxiety knows no boundaries and can affect anyone, irrespective of age. Many anxious states are rooted in childhood experiences, particularly some of the more serious ones, but anxiety can manifest at any time or can be related to whatever stage an individual is at in his or her life.
Teenagers, for example, commonly have anxieties about their self-image, exams or early relationships. When we reach our twenties and thirties, anxieties about career aspirations, marriage and parenthood can manifest. Our forties and fifties can also be particularly trying, as this time of transition invariably brings anxieties about getting older and all that this entails. When we reach our sixties and seventies, we worry about the challenges of retirement and our vulnerability in terms of health, security and mortality. In addition, throughout our adult lives, most of us are also subject to financial worries, together with anxieties concerning our children and parents.
Now, whilst all this may have just depressed you, it shouldn’t. Instead it should emphasize how important it is to develop a healthy attitude to the unavoidable stresses of life. As I’ve said before, if you deal with situations in a positive way then you are likely to experience less anxiety.
Specific Anxieties
Individuals experience anxiety in different ways, at different levels and in response to a wide variety of stressors. For example, some people appear to have an anxiety about life in general and view most things, no matter how insignificant, as a potential source of anxiety. For others, the source of anxiety may be more precise – for instance, social situations, their health or a trauma that they have suffered. When we come to very specific sources of fear, the list can be endless – spiders, injections, heights, the dentist…
The point is that our anxiety, and the extent to which it affects our lives, is very individual, therefore it pays to tackle it in a specific way. (In chapter two, we examine the various types of anxieties in detail.)
Anxiety Disorders
An anxiety becomes a disorder when it is consistent, intense and debilitating, to the extent that it disrupts your life. If you have an anxiety disorder, it is likely that you closely associate an experience or an object with danger and fear, and fixate on it. For many, that possibility of danger is exaggerated out of all proportion to the actual threat. As well as having psychological roots, anxiety disorders can also be caused and exacerbated by physical and energy imbalances in the body (we will look at this in more detail in chapter three). The result is anxiety and behavioural responses related to that anxiety.
When anxiety reaches the stage of becoming a disorder, fear can keep the body in a constant state of emergency, causing abnormal physiological functioning and malaise in both mind and body. So how do you know if you may have an anxiety disorder? The following symptoms are common (though by no means offer a definitive diagnosis):
You may also experience ‘somatic’ symptoms such as headaches, breathlessness, rapid heartbeat, holding of the breath or even physical complaints such as skin disorders or irritable bowel.
We will look at the effects of anxiety in more detail in chapter 3, but for now suffice it to say that the growing prevalence of anxiety is undoubtedly having a knock-on effect on our health in general – it is estimated, for example, that around 70 per cent of people who turn up at their doctor’s surgery are suffering from stress and anxiety.
Anxiety can manifest in many forms – phobias, panic attacks, general anxiety, health anxieties, body anxieties, obsession and compulsions, and depression. In the next chapter, we will begin to explore the different types of anxiety that people typically suffer from.
In this chapter we will be exploring the different types of anxieties that people suffer from. The aim is to increase your awareness of any anxiety that may be affecting you. By becoming more aware, you can be more specific about what you are feeling and hence begin to work on managing or eliminating your anxiety forever.
The anxiety disorders featured are the most prevalent in society today. However, I strongly suggest that you do not give yourself the luxury of a label. Although the anxieties we will be examining are labelled ‘disorders’, suffering from symptoms of one of them does not automatically mean you actually have a disorder. It simply means that you suffer from a certain level of anxiety in that particular area. Remember, an anxiety becomes a disorder when the anxiety is chronic and completely disrupts the sufferer’s life. This is very different from having a mild anxiety about a specific area of life.
Before we look at the various types of anxiety, let’s examine the methods you will be using to measure your anxiety levels.
Measuring Your Level of Anxiety
I have included two methods of measuring anxiety. The first indicates your level of anxiety and is called the SUD (subjective units of distress) scale. This scale is very well known to the therapeutic community and is used to measure levels of anxiety in the moment, as well as to monitor feedback over time. The method measures levels of distress on a scale of 0 to 10: 0–1 indicates no anxiety, 2–3 indicates slight anxiety, 4–6 indicates moderate anxiety, 7–8 indicates marked anxiety and 9–10 indicates extreme anxiety. The scale is used to indicate the intensity of specific symptoms and overall anxiety levels.
As well as measuring your level