Anxiety is your body’s natural response to stress. It is a feeling of fear or apprehension about whats to come. Many different things can lead you to feel anxious like a big exam, a job interview, or public speaking. In class, we discussed different explanations for experience anxiety which include; psychodynamic, cognitive (irrational thinking), behavioral (reinforcement), and biological (chemical imbalances). The symptoms for anxiety include; feeling nervous, restless, or tense, having a sense of impending panic, increased heart rate and rapid breathing.
Ever since high school I have personally struggled with anxiety. Anxiety Disorders run in my family so it came as no surprise to my parents when anxiety became a problem for me. Before playing a soccer game i would get really anxious and it would end up affecting how I played. Before a big test I would get that same anxious feeling and it started to affect my grades. It got to the point where my anxiety was effecting my life daily and I needed to seek some help with how to deal with it.
In class, we also talked about mood disorders and depression. I think anxiety and depression go hand in hand. If you recognize your anxious feelings are taking control of you, you need to see help before it becomes a more serious problem and can lead to other mood disorders like depression. The socio cognitive approach suggests that depression arises partly from self defeating beliefs and negative explanatory styles which can start with not knowing how to deal with your anxiety.
After I got help and learned how to deal with my anxiety I noticed an over-all movement in my mental health and my life as a whole. Just small things like taking deep breaths, or realizing that there is only so much in your life that you can control really helped me in dealing with my anxiety. Another thing that really helped me was looking into the biology behind anxiety which relates back to what we talked about early in the class about our bodies autonomic nervous system which creates the flight or fight response in our sympathetic nervous system and rest and digest response in our parasympathetic nervous system.
Everyone has anxiety from time to time, but chronic anxiety can interfere with your quality of life. As long as you are equipped with the skills and knowledge of how to deal with your anxiety and why you are feeling a certain way it becomes easier to have a hold on your anxiety. Rather than your anxiety controlling you, you control your anxiety.
Learning to control my anxiety has helped me greatly in life. Specifically, it has helped me cope with my white coat syndrome, which is the fear of the doctor’s. The last time I had a physical my heart rate went through the roof and my breath felt really shallow and rapid. So, in order to prevent this I took several deep breaths during my physical. I also put my full attention towards my breath to make sure my mind did not think too much about what could go wrong in the future. This caused my heart rate to fall to a normal level and, most importantly, made me feel relaxed and in the moment. In short, my body went from having a sympathetic, fight-or-flight response to having a parasympathetic response. Controlling my anxiety felt very empowering, and I hope it is something that I can continue to do in the future.
I thought that this passage was very telling and enlightening. I thought that the definition you gave of anxiety was phrased in a way that I had never really thought of it before. Usually, I think of anxiety as just irrational fears but you put it as a coping mechanism for stress. I figured out that if I manage my stress levels better, I am able to control my anxiety levels better. Anxiety and stress to me as the same things but I am coming to realize that one triggers the other. I love that you were able to find what works for you and get the help you needed in order to cope with your anxiety and deal with it on a day to day basis. Treating anxiety and dealing with the issues it causes improves someone’s quality of life tremendously. Anxiety is something a lot of people struggle with and coping with that is a huge part of living a wholesome life.