5 Ways To Launch An Anxiety Counter-Attack

Posted by fxckfeelings on February 18, 2016

When you’re deep in the throes of anxiety, it can be hard to manage your breathing, let alone your thoughts. Still, for some people, like our reader from earlier this week, anxiety can find a way to take over. Here are five ways to manage anxiety and launch a preemptive counter-attack before things get out of control.

1) Learn to Recognize Real Catastrophe

Tame your inner “Chicken Little” and learn how to appreciate how easily a fear of catastrophe can make you feel a catastrophe has actually occurred. Once you get better at reining in the overreacting, you can respect the way fear can help you run faster, and avoid the way it can run you into a wall.

2) Work with the Worst Case

If you’re stuck fixating on every possible impending disaster, then try using your almost-Casandra-like abilities to prepare instead of just giving yourself an ulcer. Do what you can to improve your odds, taking pride in your ability to act and make rational risk management decisions despite the urge to run and hide.

3) Gain Anxiety Expertise

Instead of looking for the one treatment that will work, become knowledgeable about all of them (which, given the limited number of treatments, is not too hard). Then try them out, looking for several partially effective treatment to provide some relief some of the time. Learn enough about treatments so you know what to do if it gets worse and your usual attempts to manage it stall out.

4) Reject Relief

Whatever relieves your anxiety—work, drink, hiding out and playing RPGs for days at a time—may become addictive, so be prepared to limit your favorite relief activities if you have to. Limiting them will, of course, make you more anxious in the short run, so relief can never be your biggest goal, because then you’re just replacing one issue with another.

5) Get Back To Your Goals

If you dropped certain goals figuring that anxiety would make reaching them impossible, pick them back up again and keep trying. Success isn’t based on how normal you feel or how much you were or weren’t able to achieve compared to your healthy self, but how well your life reflects your usual values, and how much you can still accomplish, in spite of the distracting, painful burden of anxiety.