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    How to Change Your Thinking About Anxiety: Hazelden Quick Guides
    How to Change Your Thinking About Anxiety: Hazelden Quick Guides
    How to Change Your Thinking About Anxiety: Hazelden Quick Guides
    Ebook104 pages1 hour

    How to Change Your Thinking About Anxiety: Hazelden Quick Guides

    By Leading Hazelden Experts Staff

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    About this ebook

    Apply practical strategies from the latest expert research to change the way you think and react to feelings of anxiety.

    Apply practical strategies from the latest expert research to change the way you think and react to feelings of anxiety.Do you (or does someone you know) have problems with anxiety? Perhaps you're suffering in silence, or perhaps it's affecting your daily life and relationships. Anxiety is a common emotion, and is healthy at times. But when it keeps us from activities and people we once enjoyed, it's a disruptive and terrifying feeling.Using the research of experts in the field of emotional health, this book outlines a basic understanding of anxiety and offers healthy ways to process and change our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to better deal with it. These strategies are based on Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (REBT), a widely used method of examining our own thoughts to challenge and change irrational beliefs.In this book, you willDiscover the "anatomy" of anxiety and break it down into its basic elementsLearn the different forms of anxiety so you can better care for your ownUncover your own sources of anxiety and learn how certain coping strategies often make it worseDiscover how you experience anxiety through your own thoughts, feelings, and behaviorsKnow how and when to reach out for professional help, if necessaryReclaim your life from anxiety by making conscious choices in your thinking, feeling, and acting.About Hazelden Quick GuidesHazelden Quick Guides are short, accessible e-books that draw on the original work and best practices of leading experts to help readers address common addiction recovery and emotional health issues. This first four-book collection applies the proven methods of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) to challenge and change the irrational thoughts and beliefs that contribute to the debilitating effects of shame, anger, depression, and anxiety.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHazelden Publishing
    Release dateApr 12, 2012
    ISBN9781616494353
    How to Change Your Thinking About Anxiety: Hazelden Quick Guides

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      How to Change Your Thinking About Anxiety - Leading Hazelden Experts Staff

      The Anatomy of Anxiety

      Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, wrote Søren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher. That statement makes you wonder whether he ever actually felt anxiety.

      How can you be free when your muscles are locked in tension and you start to shake? When you’re short of breath or feel like you’re slowly being smothered? There’s dizziness, yes, but also hands that go hot and sweaty or cold and clammy, a heart that pounds furiously in your chest, and thoughts that race at blinding speed.

      Along with this assault on your senses comes a fear that you’re falling into an abyss, that all your efforts to stay in control are doomed, that you’re going crazy, that you might even die. You scan the environment for a place to escape—somewhere, anywhere—and feel an urge to run and hide.

      In the midst of all this agitation, there is a path to serenity. It begins with understanding something about the nature of emotions in general. Once you step back from the experience of any emotion, take it apart, and put it under a microscope, you’ll start to free yourself from it.

      Three Points about Feelings

      Begin with the fact that human beings are feeling beings. In any given moment on any given day, we’re feeling something—pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral. We may not always express our feelings to other people. And sometimes we’re not even fully aware of them. But feelings are happening anyway, flowing like a deep river of movement and change inside us and determining our direct experience of daily life.

      We also have a push-pull relationship with feelings: We cling to the pleasant ones and we resist the unpleasant ones. While this works reasonably well most of the time, our tendency to cling and resist sometimes gets us into trouble. We adopt an adversary relationship with our feelings. We struggle to change them, control them, and fix them. At times we put so much effort into getting our emotions right that we twist ourselves into emotional knots.

      At any moment—even when you’re feeling extremely afraid, sad, or mad—you can get back in balance. You can start to untwist yourself by remembering three key points about the nature of emotions.

      Emotions are useful. During the course of human evolution, human beings developed emotions for a purpose. Emotions are invitations to action. This is true of unpleasant emotions as well as pleasant emotions. For example, anger prepares us to defend ourselves against a possible aggressor. Fear reminds us to avoid people, places, or things that might be dangerous. Sadness prepares us to withdraw from our normal round of activity, slow down, and take some time to recover from loss and learn from failure.

      Remembering these facts can help us relax our internal struggle with unpleasant emotions a little bit. Anger, sadness, and fear are not alien experiences. These emotions are hardwired into us. They might not always be fun. But they’re normal, and our wisest option is simply to accept them.

      Emotions are impermanent. No matter what emotion you’re feeling right now, you can count on one thing—it will change. Every emotion has a natural life span. Even the hottest flash of anger and the deepest sting of shame will pass away in their own time. No emotion lasts forever.

      Emotions are often compared to waves. Like a wave, every emotion appears, rises to a peak, and then falls. This might seem obvious. But it’s one of the first things that we forget when we’re feeling upset.

      Just as some waves rise to enormous heights, some emotions rise to great peaks of intensity. At those peak moments, we might feel that we’re drowning. The emotion feels like a destructive force of nature—a hurricane, cyclone, or flood that’s raging inside us. We worry that we won’t survive, that it’s too much to bear. We forget that this moment is just the peak of the wave. In fact, an emotion often feels most unpleasant right before it begins to recede.

      Remembering that emotions are impermanent helps us ride out the waves. Sure, we might feel pretty yucky during a wave of sadness, anger, or fear. But these are not permanent occupants of our psyche. In every moment, emotions are changing. To every emotion we can apply that old saying: "This, too, shall

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