Anxiety - Looking Into Your Anxiety

In this article we are going to take a look into anxiety from a CBT perspective. By learning more about the condition of anxiety, you can start to work with it instead of treating it as an obstacle to life.

Anxiety is a serious mental health disorder that can affect many things involving your life. It's not just a case of low mood and it's not simply a case of "snapping out of it". Some people can live with anxiety for years before they actually learn to do anything about it. Anxiety has many faces and there are different types. Sometimes they occur after a major event like giving birth, or sometimes we just wake up feeling anxiety. Ordinarily, if we are lucky, the feeling goes away, but in some cases we are stuck feeling anxiety and it can be tremendously hard to actually ask for help.

When treating anxiety, CBT can help you to change negative ideas, unrealistic expectations and overly critical self-judgment, which can often lead to, or lengthen, anxiety. CBT will help you to recognize which problems are significant and which ones are minor. It can also help you to develop positive life goals and a more realistic self-perception.

You're not alone

It's scientifically proven that at some point or another, a number of people will suffer from some degree of anxiety and not even know it. Chances are you've joined this self-help program because you do not feel quite right to some extent or another. You have come to the right place as we aim to help you work through your problems to help you feel better.

Making a self-diagnosis

Next, you will decide what the scale of your anxiety really is. This allows you to work it out and literally evaluate your mood for possibly the first time. By looking at how you feel, and what your problems are, you really are taking the first and most important step towards dealing with your anxiety.

By "working it out" you can give yourself both a confirmation that you are suffering from anxiety and also something to work from. Using this as a reference, you can gauge your level of anxiety and hopefully by the time you've finished this program you'll feel a lot better and for the first time in a while you'll be able to see some progress and achievements. Even just making this self-diagnosis is an achievement that you can be proud of.

Anxiety - a cycle of negative thinking

This figure shows the cycle of anxiety, which illustrates that anxiety is a continuous loop of negative thinking. What's so important about negative thinking is that according to CBT, it's not events themselves that upset you, but the meanings you give them. Your negative thinking can block you from seeing things that don't fit with what you believe are true. In other words, you are effectively stuck in this self-perpetuating, continuous cycle that will continue until you can get yourself out of it or reach out for help. Just by joining this self-help program you have taken the first step and luckily CBT is one of best ways to break this cycle of negative thinking.

Realistically, good times of life will lead to positive emotions and also, as you may have guessed, when bad things happen, they will make us feel bad. Part of the problem with anxiety is that we forget our feelings and even good things can make us feel bad. Anxiety effectively confuses our personal meanings and it ends up that we start to have unhealthy and negative thoughts, when in reality it's not the event that is overly bad or negative, but simply anxiety that is making us feel bad about the event.

Take a look below for some examples of inappropriate thoughts that we all suffer from, from time to time.

Stop the cycle by identifying your problems

One of the first steps you can take towards overcoming your anxiety with CBT is to actually put your problems down on paper, and start to rank them based on how they affect you. At first this might seem difficult to you since maybe it's not clear to you what's causing your anxiety or it can be confused because of anxiety itself. But it's really important that you dig deep into yourself and try to identify the problems that affect your anxiety the most, since knowing what it is will help you to cure, adapt or eliminate the problem. These problems can be physical, emotional or behavioral as in the example below, but in your worksheet you will write down problems that you perceive are contributing to your anxiety. This will be the starting point for making you realize that your anxiety isn't just something abstract and like "an immovable mountain" but instead it consists of things that you truly can affect.

Your most significant problems

Now, from your list of your problems, you are going to select the five problems that you think are most significant to you. This is important since it can feel overwhelming dealing with all the problems at once, but more importantly, by initially dealing with a few problems you will, over time, discover that what you have seen as big problems really aren't problems anymore. To get a better understanding of your five most significant problems you are going to break them down and take a look at the ongoing effects that these problems have. Look at the example below for some inspiration before you fill in your own top five problems and break them down.

When you have written down your top five problems, take a look at them and think about how one problem affects another and the impact that they have on your life. Then, ask yourself the following questions:

Do problems fall into one specific category?
Do problems overlap?

Your long term goal

Setting long term goals is very important since it's very difficult getting somewhere if you don't know where you're going. When you're suffering from anxiety it's common that you feel unhappy, emotionally distressed or caught up in a cycle of negative thinking. The difficulty is that you're often so caught up in your anxiety that you're unable to really understand what's wrong. Hopefully by looking at your most significant problems and breaking them down you have now circumscribed what's making you suffer from anxiety.

For this self-help program to be constructive and for it to be adjustable to you, you are now going to set up long term goals. By formulating goals you will help yourself to pin down exactly what it is that you want to achieve with this program, rather than just saying that you want to be free from your anxiety. This is so important since anxiety differs from person to person. By setting up specific goals you give yourself signposting and above all you have something to compare with in the future.

When you formulate your long term goals, imagine what you want to be able to do in, say, 6 month. Be as specific as possible since it will give you more guidance and it will be easier for you to follow up if you have reached where you want to be. When formulating your goals use positive terms like "I want to be able to go to big parties I've been invited to". (Don't formulate a goal like: "I want so stop avoiding going to big parties" since it uses negative terms). You need to prioritize between your goals and a good idea is to proceed from your most significant problems.

Maybe you are still unsure what your specific goals are. In this case you can go back and update your goals later on during this program, since upcoming articles will help you to dig deeper into your anxiety. But at least try to set some long term goals right now. Remember, you have no control over other people's behavior so the goals are only going to be about you. If you experience other people's behavior as a problem, one goal could be learning to counter and deal with other people's criticism. Read below for an example of one goal that proceeds from the most significant problems one may identify.