Anxiety is manifested and experienced in three areas:

• Emotions – the feelings you have while in a stated of anxiety
• Physical – sensations and bodily reactions and symptoms that appear as you become anxious, or are present through the anxiety cycle
• Thoughts – the thoughts, ideas and self conversations you have with yourself that either increase or lead to being anxious.

The relationship between these three components and their relative contribution to the level, outcome and type of anxiety can be visualized in the figure below: Main Anxiety Treatment Areas An individual experiences of anxiety can vary from individual to individual. Generally, anxiety expresses itself predominantly in one or two of these areas, and quite often across all three areas.  So some times you may see anxiety expressing itself in one of the following:

• their behavior
• somatic outcomes or symptoms, and
• thoughts held and generated during the passage of the anxiety attack.

Or a combination of these. Over time and in different anxiety disorders, one area becomes of greater concern or presents more of a problem to ‘ride it out for the individual sufferer’.  For some, the physical symptoms of a racing heart, panting, sweating, etc., may be the most difficult part of anxiety to manage. For others, the intrusive and underlying thoughts that almost compulsively invade their minds could be the greatest challenge. They  can over come the physical symptoms through warm baths, relaxation breathing and exercise, but these continuous fearful thoughts that pop into their mind for no apparent reason at all can be their biggest challenge, and so on…….. Whilst the very same symptoms can be so crippling for others that a medical intervention is needed. no matter the mixture and type you will find anxiety being manifested in one of these areas and a good treatment for anxiety needs to engage all three of these areas in order to be effective over the long term. Furthermore, whilst physical symptoms is the area that tends to engage the attention first and is easily managed in the short-term via some drug or the other (allopathic, herbal or homeopathic) over the long-term a treatment approach needs more than that to be effective. So the best treatment for anxiety is an approach that can engage the physiological responses, thought patterns and the behavioral dimensions of anxiety.

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