Anxiety and you

Have you felt anxious at some point in your life?

Frequent worrier?

Have illness, being fired, feeling discriminated, unemployment, job searching, new job, moving to a new city— made you feel stressed and overloaded?

Have you had full blown panic attacks – chest pain, palpitations, sweating, shortness of breath and dizziness?

Is your anxiety becoming part of a cycle of doubt, worry, fear, inaction, paralysis, depression?

“You need some anxiety in your life and it’s there for a reason. It’s what motivates us to work and keeps us out of trouble,” says Dr. Tom Rebori, medical director of the Mood and Anxiety Disorders Center at Evanston Northwestern Healthcare in Illinois.

If anxiety is interfering with your daily life – disrupting sleep or concentration – it could mean that you have an anxiety disorder. New treatments and research offer good news: anxiety disorders are highly treatable.

Here are the four main anxiety disorders, plus tips and techniques to cope with them and learn to deal with them.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)

In the last six months, have you spent half of the days worrying?

Excessive worrying — which interferes with daily life — also causes physical symptoms like low energy, sleep disturbances, muscle tension, sweating, nausea and difficulty concentrating.

Here are two ways of coping.

Keep a worry log so you see patterns and learn to replace negative thinking with another thought until you gradually change your inner dialogue.

Set up “worry periods.” Dr. Dave Carbonell at Anxiety Treatment Center in New York tells patients to set up two 10-minute worry periods every day where they can isolate themselves. By giving their full attention to the worry, it becomes boring because there’s not that much content to it.

Panic Disorder

Scared of losing control, that you’re dying or fearful that you’re going crazy?

Panic attacks occur in certain settings—a crowded mall, elevators. You can associate a situation with that reaction and start avoiding certain situations. Just because you’ve had a panic attack doesn’t mean you have panic disorder, though, unless you’ve had at least two unexpected panic attacks, followed by at least one month of concern about experiencing another attack.

Getting to understand what’s happening is key to treating the disorder: facing (not avoiding certain situations), accepting (not fighting the panic attack, but welcoming it), floating (relaxing through the anxiety without resistance, like floating through water) and letting time pass (knowing that the attack will pass).

Phobia

Social phobias involve an intense fear of situations – usually social or performance-related settings – for fear of having a panic attack.

Specific phobias involve an excessive fear of an object or situation that causes anxious symptoms similar to a panic attack.

Social phobias are treated the same as panic disorders. For specific phobias, the common treatment is gradual exposure.

The first step is to talk about the fear to begin to understand that you won’t die or go crazy when in contact with object or situation.

Post-traumatic stress disorder

Whereas GAD patients worry about the future, PTSD involves worrying about something that happened.

PTSD is a condition where sufferers have been through some kind of traumatic experience. The symptoms are a heightened degree of arousal, nightmares or recurring thoughts, feelings of detachment, sleep problems, high startle response or jumpiness, flashbacks and depression.

Treatment is learning how to live in the present through relaxation.

Anxiety disorder symptoms can come and go. Yet it makes common sense to ease stress, eat healthier and exercise – lifetime habits that will help in the long run.

Set aside time every day for relaxing – use aPrayer, meditate, go for a mindful walk, enjoy a hot or naked yoga session, listen to music, soak in a hot bath – anything where you’re just being you.

For more information:

Edmund J. Bourne, The Anxiety and Phobia Workbook, New Harbinger Publications: 2000.

Anxiety Disorders Association of America
http://www.adaa.org

National Institute of Mental Health
http://www.nimh.nih.gov

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/04/130408133020.htm

Is it time to think about your life?

A few questions to ponder…

Do you have a strong self-concept, a powerful sense of your own worth and potential?

How are you dealing with and solving problems in your life?

How can you improve the quality of your relationships with family, friends, fiduciaries and co-workers?

Do you present your opinions and views and speak assertively or aggressively?

Do you have the information, knowledge, and understanding of larger issues that affect you?

Do you and make healthy lifestyle and life choices?

What’s your ability to respond?

Are you setting and achieving goals?

Do you know and understand that you can have an impact on the world?

Do you create projects that improve the lives others and strengthen communities?

Power shift: spirituality

Spirituality beyond established religions is giving men new views of themselves.

Men live in the universe and the universe lives in men.

Service and prayer strengthen our bonds and spirits.

We’re made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
Carl Sagan

Keys to personal improvement and development

Break free from unconscious, habitual ways of reacting to life that were born thousands of years ago.

Embrace higher ways of being.

You will discover ways to see things as a celebration, by being gracious and doing things that fit your higher purpose.

Keys to personal improvement and development

As you learn how adapt to your capacities, you literally move into a new way of being.

You are a human being learning to benefit from your hour of focus.

Learn how to play with time in such a way as to develop a skill or move a project forward. Set backs can only propel you forward. The bruise will heal. Let go of the past and move on.

Learn to navigate the complexity of life with elegance and confidence.

Keys to personal improvement and development

Allow yourself to discover and to gain insight into your life at four levels of your human capacity:

Sensory-physical

Psychological-emotional

Mythical-symbolical

Unitive-spiritual

What are the keys to empowering new beliefs about yourself?

The first key to activating your life’s purpose as a man is to hold new beliefs about yourself and your role in our human future.

Your life – living a great life – requires that you understand today’s challenges and opportunities.

To understand this for yourself, gather information yourself. It can serve as a guide on your path as a man.

Assess your motivations and values in life.

Try a little self-help

Sixty percent of DC-area residents believe psychologists can help them cope with mental health issues.

Here’s a self-help method to complement therapies!

Using your journal as binoculars to shorten the distance

Use your journal like a pair of binoculars to make what appears distant, appear closer. From your daily experience:

Are you able to identify any underlying or overarching issues or recurrent themes?

What could be done to change the situation?

How will this alter your future behaviors, attitudes or career?

Have you thought about tomorrow?

What does the future hold?

Photo courtesy of Mike Dozer.

What do you enjoy about journaling?

Journaling is recording or writing about yourself, your prayers or your spiritual life to capture, memorialize and examine your experience in praying.

Journaling helps you to create a baseline and to remember the fruits of your prayer, those things you heard during prayer and those things you can change.

“It is always so good to write out our problems down so that in reading them over six months or a year later, one can see them evaporate.” (Bergan and Schwan, Birth: A Guide for Prayer).

Use your aPrayer app’s journaling feature to record your problem so that six months or a year later, you hear how they’ve become silent.