Contemporary and Devastating: The Plague of Anxiety Disorder

It is emotionally and energetically exhaustive and causes many cardio-vascular, gastro-intestinal and immune system disorders, not to mention its ability to distract productive life, deprive of joy and happiness, for people are not capable of feeling positive and negative emotions simultaneously.

The amount of information in modern world is doubling every six months and as it is well-stated by wise kind Solomon, the more people know, the more there is to worry about. “For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.” (Ecclesiastes 1:18)

Resent trends demonstrate that people even outside of stressful situations, tend to feel more anxious, cannot relax and be happy. Anxiety is very often confused with fear; however these two are absolutely different terms and feelings. Moderate fear is absolutely normal and helps to foresee a danger and mobilize organism resources to overcome it. The reason of fear is usually obvious or can be explained easily, therefore in general it is short-term and passes without any serious damage to human’s psyche. The issue is, a permanent intensive fear might often grow into anxiety and chronic uneasiness, with difficult to explain reasons and is characterised by three basic components: excessive thinking and imagining of the worst; avoiding at any price of presumptive negative outcome; and suppression of emotions.

Vast majority of people, trying to become “strong personality” tend to deny anxiety and keep it to themselves at the same time using several well-known, but damaging methods of coping with it. One of such methods is rationalization, which is purely an attempt to prove his or her correctness and justify behaviour thus abdicating all responsibility for what is happening around them. Another method widely used to cope with anxiety is narcotization: getting drugs, alcohol, or medicaments, and smoking with the aim to calm down and “look aside”. This same method includes over-indulgence with work, shopping and socialization. Denial – an attempt to ignore feeling of anxiety–  is yet another way people tend to utilize to cope with anxiety, which is as less effective as the first two methods and not less harmful, for it results in avoidance of specific thoughts, emotions and situations and forming internal ban, which significantly narrow individual’s frames.

In order to grasp this annoying feeling and reduce its manifestations, it is necessary to understand which situations and thoughts are triggering it. There is nothing fortuitous when it comes to the reactions of our wise organisms. Anxiety is the condition of unconscious stress, which requires huge amount of energy to cope with. Organism would not spend its strength for no particular reason, therefore frequent feeling of anxiety must be considered as the “signal flag” from the subconscious: “Attention! Something very important is happening and it is necessary to do something about it”.

In case the anxiety attacks are frequent, a person needs to try and spend some time and attention to watch him or herself. What have been done, seen, thought which triggered the anxiety??? Thus specific situations might be identified and analysed for the root causes. With this completed the various methods can be utilized to fight the anxiety.

Let us briefly discuss several practical techniques, aimed to neutralize the anxiety.

Some people quite efficiently use the postponement of anxiety: “I am booked to dentist in a week time. Well… I still have a week. It is too early to worry about it right now. I will think about it when the time comes” or transferring of the thoughts into the “now”: “When this dentist visit is planned for? One week from now? And where am I now? What am I doing? I guess it is better to concentrate on this action, for as Buddhists correctly say – Cleaning the carpet think about the carpet”

Let it happen. Very often it is too late to do anything about the issue: “Oh, I am going to be late, but I cannot change it. But I can accept it with the least loss for my psyche. Well, what really would happen if I am late?” The next very important step is to visualize a positive reaction of what would happen if something we are dreading happens.

Negative emotions can be direct into the peaceful channel – change it: “Well, I am late this time. What lesson I can learn from this in order to avoid re-occurrence of such situations?” They can also be directed into the action for this is indeed what it was developed for in the first place – to obtain energy and motivation to change something we do not like or we fear: “What can I do about it right now?”

To overcome the tendency of anxiety denial try not to hide anxiety. Share it with your relatives or friends. Suppression of emotions leads to the row of psycho-somatic problems from high blood pressure to back pains.

Diary is an extremely good tool when it comes to fighting the anxiety. Fill in a diary of the anxieties and the ways to overcome them. It is very efficient therapeutic method for it allows separating your identity and a reason of anxiety. It is sort of having “An internal observer” describing the reason of anxiety without being emotionally involved in it. Besides, re-reading the diary, a person sometimes can find the reasons of anxiety being inadequate to psycho-emotional processes and start identification of patterns, which would help to eliminate the reasons themselves. One can also use your diary to put three positive things which happened to you during the day. Do not say nothing good happened to you, it is just your brain that does not want to mention it and you can re-train it!

However useful and convenient tool of our everyday life is TV, it is better to minimize its presence in your life, especially news and commercials, which make people to worry about the things, which they cannot influence anyway. In its stead, focus on the sources of positive emotions and try and make talking about yourself in positive terms.

All the above techniques are very effective in case an individual could identify the reason of anxiety. However, every so often, people might feel unexplainable anxiety, concerned with uncertainty and obscurity.

As I have mentioned above, a minimum amount of anxiety has to be present in everyday life, as it is impossible to foresee everything and there should be some sort of motive for action. Therefore one of the anxiety reasons can be passiveness, where it gives warning of incompleteness of situation or condition. Maybe one has postponed troublesome task? Or does not want to make a decision related to annoying situation? The anxiety will disappear as soon as the situation is squared away.

Neurotic Anxiety can also take place when the level of self-clime is too high, while self-appraisal is lower than a plinth. Such condition is accompanied by self-flagellation and self-abasement. There is only one way out of this type of anxiety: reduce the lath. There is no need just to keep going towards the perfection seen on the pages of glossy magazines. Of course at the beginning it would wound self-esteem, however in long-range outlook one will be able to accomplish something in its own way step by step reaching success and increasing the level of self-appraisal.

Probably the most complicated type of anxiety is the one being an individual quality. Very often anxious personality is formed from heightened sensibility. The rest depends on upbringing and circle; if highly sensible child is overly patronized, restricted and controlled – there are all chances to recommend the outer world as being very dangerous and if that child is constantly reproached with, than well-defined feel of guiltiness will give birth to the anxiety of making mistakes. The person with this type of anxiety will be beaten completely by top-heavy demands, which he or she is incapable of fulfilling. It is almost impossible to fight this type of anxiety on one’s own and it is preferable to accept the professional psychiatrist of psychologists help.

Another reason of generalized anxiety can be blockage of desires and feelings, which cannot be consciously accepted. Soul-searching was never easy, but the old good “reflection” method can be of great use. If you hate child-free, are sceptic about “rainbow” flags or disdain those breaking other’s families? Try to fit this hatred and defiance on your own self. Congratulations! You are the one you so dislike. Now it is up to you to decide: accept something new and unpleasant within yourself or keep on dwelling in chronic anxiety.

Accepting new and unknown can be anxious, but lack of action can result in in stagnation. I would like to mention the type of anxiety, which we are aware about thanks to Jean-Paul Sartre. The very type of anxiety, which appears from understanding individual’s real solitude and his or her feebleness against aging and death. Not without purpose there are so many religions across the world, however, it does not worth making the Most High responsible for your life. Accepting this fact is much more efficient. Unfortunately this is especially individual internal confrontation of each and every of us.