That's what we are here for. To show you how to deal with your anxiety!
Anxiety disorders respond well to a self management, self-treatment approach.
Anxiety disorders don't just go away with time, nor does the taking medication magically remove them - they can be treated and managed, but you have to do a large part of work yourself.
So learning how to deal with your anxiety and its associated problems is one of the steps along the path of 'curing' your anxiety.
Click Here For A Review And Comparison Of The Good Anxiety Self Help Programs
You can use these seven steps to discover, identify and set about addressing your anxiety difficulties and deciding whether you are going to self-treat or you need to engage professional help:
- Identify if the problem is anxiety based.
- Try to categorize the Anxiety Disorder you could be experiencing
- Determine if you need assistance or can try and address it yourself
- Determine the two anxiety dominant areas that your treatment program must address
- Identify your treatment and if you can go it alone
- Identify your self-help program or resources, material and techniques you may need
- Try it yourself
Anxiety symptoms can come alone as an Anxiety Disorder or part of another problem, such as, depression, drugs and alcohol and certain illnesses.
They can be short lived and intense or continuous and chronic and manifests either as a mild form of stress or an absolute terror experience.
Anxiety symptoms can be pure or mixed as part of something else.
Read more about Anxiety Disorder Symptoms or download the mini booklet, Panic Disorders, taken from the the USA's National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) website for your convenience.
If it is mixed with something, like depression, then you need expert medical assistance immediately and don't try and walk this path alone.
If it is 'clean', (pure) anxiety and not an outcome of a physical illness or depression, etc, then see if you can try and categorize the type of anxiety you may be suffering from and which of the seven types of Anxiety Disorders it could be so you can decide if you can manage it yourself or need professional help.
I would always use a professional's help for the diagnostic step, but a lot of people resort to anxiety questionnaires and the opinions of other sufferers to help them with this step.
There are three occasion when you should take your anxiety to a professional. In other instances you can certainly try to address it yourself under a good self-treatment approach:
Ideally, you should arrive at a diagnosis of your Anxiety Disorder as an exclusion diagnosis. You should first check that it has not arisen because of some other medical problem and if no physical illness is present then you can begin to identify it as an Anxiety Disorder.
Some Anxiety Disorders, such as, OCD and PSTD, do have distinct symptoms and characteristics and can easily be diagnosed.
Also, don't naturally be anti-psychiatry in your approach, because anxiety illnesses such as GAD are very responsive to SRNIs. Also, anxiety attacks can be trigger by life events, such as, death of a long-term partner, relocation, retrenchment, etc. and medical support can be a great help over the transition period, as you come to terms with these life events and can ensure that these naturally occurring anxiety difficulties do not descend into a more complicated difficulties.
Anxiety is experienced in three areas of:
Generally one or two of these can be very dominant.
Your treatment approach should engage at least two of these areas simultaneously to derive to best outcome
This is way a combinative approach, such as therapy, especially Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which can address thought management, self concept, any misperception of life events you may hold and medical support for the management of severe physical symptoms. This approach has been found to be most effective.
Furthermore, if you are anti medication, then your self treatment approach needs to engage thought processes and techniques so you can use this modality to quell the physical anxiety symptoms that can arise.
You can briefly read about my treatment cone model which will give you a theoretical structure for selecting your self-treatment method and techniques that you are going to use
Some Anxiety Disorders, however, do need the help of a professional to get you started and then you can move onto to your own resources. You can use the professional's help in identifying the dominant area you need to engage that triggers your anxiety attacks.
I am saying that in most instances you can start off trying to address your anxiety difficulties via a self-treatment approach, provided you bear in mind the reservations I have outline.
If your anxiety is concomitant with depression, then do not 'go it alone' and get immediate professional help.
You may also find that the help of previous sufferers or the joining of a support group will give you the confidence to 'journey' by yourself and a forum to discuss your experiences.
But remember a lot of the techniques that are used can be very ideographic (may work for one person but not another), so you have to do your own journey and work.
If your anxiety has come about because of a traumatic life advent, (mugging, injury, physical violence, etc.) then de-briefing/crisis counselling is absolutely necessary first.
We indicate three programs on this web site that you can use as they have had good success and have been durable over time
They are not the only approaches and the book "Overcoming Anxiety for Dummies" is a good place to start, besides the information you can find on this website.
Whatever you do, stay with the approaches that how a good record and been around for a while, because any false claims would have been 'flushed out' by then.
Self help treatment does have a role to play in Anxiety Disorders, as they are responsive to this approach and good successes have been achieved, but if your efforts are not going any where then don't blindly stick by them or start jumping from one approach to another
Go and get good professional help to get yourself back on track and then you can come back to your self treatment efforts.
If you feel you are a good candidate for a self-treatment approach then go ahead.
If you run into difficulties and need additional information,please contact us and leave a message and we will try our best to answer them or direct you to where you can get reliable and safe information.
Click Here For A Review And Comparison Of The Good Anxiety Self Help Programs