Let’s educate ourselves on the most common mental illness today.

You’ll find a lot of content on google so I thought it’d be best to write this post to help you explain to others what anxiety is and how it works.

It’s said over 30% percent of the population is born with anxiety disorders and 4 out of 5 people would have experienced strong short-term anxiety at some point in their life. Only 10% of people suffering from anxiety actually get professional treatment, the rest allow themselves to live through it until it passes. Whether you choose professional treatment or self-healing methods the information below is worth reading.  

Anxiety is the way every animal and living being generates more energy to certain areas when preparing to protect itself. Animals are commonly known to activate many changes when a predictor is around. With humans, our bodies will redirect energy in preparation for self-protection and therefore we’ll be able to do things such as run faster/longer and survive days without food etc. In principle, anxiety is a resource the body needs before, during and after a dangerous situation.

An Anxiety disorder is when the mind activates the fearful natural responses in the body. For example, whilst presenting to an audience people may feel their legs shake because the body is getting ready to run. Short-term anxiety is normally situational and applies to changes in health, relationships, or stability. Long-term anxiety is your emotional relationship to certain triggers and will make your short-term anxiety levels much higher on certain triggers. We diagnose long-term anxiety when we listen to your experiences over 3-4 situations to spot the common pattern or we can question to trace a particular thought to its root cause.

Here are the 3 main styles of approach to clearing anxiety. See which one applies to you and be careful if your information source has led you to combining them as they are 3 different directions to clearing anxiety. The end goal is to build a resourceful state for yourself so that anxiety will work for you rather than against you.

Relaxation approach. Commonly seen in yoga, mindfulness and massages. If you are one to feel great again after a few days of relaxing then implementing relaxation abilities into your life will be a blessing, it’ll allow you to remain calm no matter what storm is taking place.

Strengthening method. You’d use strengthening methods to give yourself an upper edge when facing challenges. These are challenge specific, for example presenting, socialising and going into unknown situations. The journey for you is to move away from self-doubting and move towards confidence building. Treat this as a journey otherwise you’ll build short term skills and then doubt your ability to hold them, we encourage habits that urge you to do self-development activities.

Mental reasoning. This is the most common for people dealing with triggers from the past. The core principle is to revisit and change the emotional relationship you have with certain memories and the meaning attached to them. If you try to pursue relaxation methods or strengthening methods onto an unresolved trigger it’ll cause you to store energy until you are eventually triggered. The future scoping of this is really good because you use what was once a weakness as a strength.

If you decide to see a therapist make sure you continue your journey thereafter because one day you’ll grow to help other people suffering the same. Help them find their preferred style and that’ll allow them to redirect the painful sensation anxiety creates and redirect it into inner strength. If you require further information or have any questions feel free to reach out as I’d be happy to answer. Darshan@deeppsyc.com

‍