Decreasing Anxiety in 7 Steps: Step 2

In part one of this series, we explored what anxiety is and is not on an abstract level to begin building a foundation of knowledge to build upon. Now, let’s make the topic a bit more personal by exploring how you personally experience anxiety.

Step Two: Familiarization:

You may have had enough encounters with anxiety to know that it is an emotion that you struggle with and that it affects you more than you would like. When clients tell me that they struggle with anxiety, one of my next questions is: in what way? Or, how do you know that you’re anxious?

If these seem like basic questions, that’s because they are. Often times, although someone may be aware that they combat anxiety regularly, they may not yet know the specifics about their experience, such as the ways they feel anxiety happening in the body or affecting the mind. As a therapist working with clients that face anxiety, it’s important to me that we both learn and know what your experience is like. This will help us to identify what about anxiety is most troubling to you and formulate goals to work towards in our work together as well as track progress over time.

Here’s a list of ways that people may experience anxiety. You might find a few or many items on the list that you can recall happening just before, during, or after you have been anxious, and notice that some happen more often for you than others.

· Difficulty breathing

· Difficulty sleeping at night

· Feeling dizzy or lightheaded

· Having your face flush

· Feeling faint

· Fearful of dying

· Fear of losing control

· Fearful of the worst happening

· Feeling hot

· Feeling a choking sensation

· Having trembling hands

· Noticing the heart is pounding or racing

· Sensing indigestion or discomfort in the abdomen

· Feeling nervous

· Feeling numbness or tingling in areas

· Feeling as if you are “on edge”

· Having racing thoughts

· Shakiness

· Sweating (not due to heat)

· Feeling terrified

· Being unable to relax

· Feeling unsteady

· Having wobbliness in legs

That’s a lot of ways that a person can have to deal with anxiety! Luckily, most folks don’t have everything on this list happen to them with regularity or great intensity. Regardless, in this list you can see that there are a great many ways to possibly feel anxiety physically and emotionally. This is a fact that has been known to make folks feel anxious when they consider starting to track their anxiety symptoms more closely and learn about their current experience. The potential of increasing your awareness of just how and when you’re experiencing anxiety can seem overwhelming for some, and understandably so. However, in order to more accurately set our intention of decreasing the frequency and effects of anxiety in your daily life, we have to begin with bringing attention to what already exists.

That was a standard list of ways that anxiety can manifest itself, and I think it’s quite thorough, too. However, when I help people learn about how to recognize their anxiety, I often don’t stop there. Another component to learning about anxiety is determining what anxiety related behaviors you may be doing as well. Here’s another list, this one based on what my previous clients and I have determined to be part of their anxiety related behaviors. It’s important to point out that these behaviors are often done unconsciously, without intention, and that someone may not even notice they’ve been doing it for some time after beginning until someone else points it out.

· Tapping one or both feet

· Bouncing or Shaking one or both legs

· Clicking a pen or pencil open or closed

· Scratching or picking at the skin

· Biting or chewing on the lips or cheeks

· Tapping one or more fingers

· Picking or biting at the nails or cuticle beds

· Popping one or more joints

· Chewing or pulling on hair

· Fidgeting with something in the hands

· Avoiding Eye Contact

· Clearing the throat or coughing

· Stretching or moving a part of the body

· Inhaling or Exhaling in a certain way

· Making certain sounds that relieve stress

· Pacing

In addition to behaviors like these, many people will identify over time that there are certain interpersonal behaviors that are more likely to do when they’re anxious such as: using a negative or “snappy” tone with someone, “lash out” or be otherwise more irritable with others more than normal, react more emotionally or sensitively than normal, become more dependent or clingy for others to meet your emotional needs, and feel so overwhelmed or unable to express emotions that they cancel work, school, or social activities.

That's all for this step!

This week, your homework is to consider what things on these lists you experience, what ones bother you, and how often you’re having these sensations or doing these behaviors. I usually suggest tracking this for at least two weeks so that you have plenty of time to observe yourself in various situations to get a good read of yourself.

Now that we’ve read through these lists together and added even more information and knowledge about what it’s like to have and experience anxiety, we’re ready to take our work to the next step. Next week, in step three of this blog series, we’ll discuss what to do with all of this information after you've begun collecting it.