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Anxiety Self Help Strategy January 11/06 Part One Insight into your anxiety is probably one
of the most important keys to getting relief. There may be many
reasons we suffer from anxiety so we will have to look at all
aspects of our lives. Many things can be the cause of this
condition such as stress, chronic pain, depression, medical
issues, alcohol/drug abuse and traumatic events in our lives.
Maybe you fit into one of these categories or maybe a
combination of them. It is important to reflect on our current
lifestyle and past life experiences to find the answers. So what
happens when we find these answers. Well we can use a problem
solving approach to deal with each of the issues. How is it
done? The first phase is the assessment phase which involves
what was just described earlier in this article. We need to look
back at our current lifestyle and past experiences. It is very
helpful to write down these thoughts for easy reference when
moving to the next phase. Once we have completed the assessment
phase what do we do with all of this information? The next step
in exploring our causes of anxiety is to identify problem areas
from this information. You should be able to see the problem
areas quite easily. Some areas may be work related, medical,
stress load, family, past traumatic experiences etc as discussed
earlier. Make a list of these problem areas keeping them as
simple as possible. Try to use only a couple of words to
identify each problem if possible. So if you complete this
exercise properly your list should look something like this:
1)chronic stress 2) Employment problems 3) current alcohol use
4) death of loved one 3 years ago. Of course this is an example
and you will make your list out of the problems you have
discovered in your assessment phase. This is a good start and
may be time consuming to complete so the rest of this article
will be posted in upcoming Anxiety Tip of the Day column. Part
Two In the last article we were at the point where we completed
out assessment and identified problem areas. The nest step we
need to take is to prioritize what problems we need to look at
first. In our example we can see 4 problem areas. At this point
you will have to make your own decision on what problem should
be given first priority. For this example we are going to
prioritize in this order: 1)current alcohol use 2)chronic stress
3)death of loved one 3 years ago 4) Employment problems. Now we
can clearly see some of the causes of our anxiety and can
formulate a plan to address these issues. Our first problem we
identified is the current alcohol use. For this example we will
say that this person is currently consuming 3-6 drinks per day
and more on the weekends. Their use has been gradually
increasing and it is probable that they have an addiction. Now
we have to look at ways to deal with this problem area. There
are many options one can look at such as a) Detox b) 12 step
program c) Self Help Group d) Medications e) Professional
Counseling Service. The key is to tackle one problem at a time.
Often dealing with one problem area will help us solve another
related problem at the same time. In our example taking care of
the addiction will impact the other identified problems and give
us a good head start on the total picture. As time goes on we
can re organize and re evaluate so that we can achieve optimum
wellness. By completing this exercise it will impact us in a
positive way and aid us in decreasing our anxiety.
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