Anxiety Management Techniques

1.       Accept Expect and Allow Anxious Feelings: Try not to feel surprised, disappointed, or angry at yourself when anxious thoughts and feelings arise. These thoughts, while disturbing, are not dangerous. Allow them to exist, focus on functioning in spite of them, and they will soon dissipate. If you fight them, or try to get rid of them, your anxiety level will take more time to calm down.

2.       Identify Your Anxiety Level on a Scale of 0 to 10: Zero means you are feeling no anxiety. Ten means are feeling panic. Identifying and recording your anxiety level makes you an active participant in learning to manage your anxiety, and it establishes a baseline against which you can measure your progress.

3.       Monitor Your Anxiety Levels: Observe your anxiety level as it rises and falls in relation to what you focus on. Watch your level rise as you try to rid yourself of anxious feelings. Watch it fall when you accept and allow these feelings. Your level will fall even if you do nothing more than wait and let time pass. Once you get into the habit of identifying your levels and watching them change, you'll be pleasantly surprised to find how relatively infrequently really high levels occur and how quickly they pass when they do arise.

4.       Anchor Yourself in the Present: The present is your safe harbor. Stay there by concentrating on "what is," rather than "what if?" Describe your surroundings, talk to someone, count backwards from 100 by threes, read, sing or listen to the radio. Don't get stuck in your future-oriented imagination. Stay in the here and now.

5.       Don't Plan Your Escape: Planning your escape tends to intensify anxious thoughts and feelings. It projects you out of the present and into the future where you are most subject to catastrophic thoughts and disturbing feelings. Rather than immediately following your old impulse to avoid and flee, try instead to cautiously stay in contact with what frightens you, while practicing your skill at fear management.

6.       You Can Function Well with High Levels of Anxiety: Try not to be so hard on yourself, don't go for perfectionism. You can still function even with high levels of anxiety. You are not likely to scream, faint, or do the embarrassing, outrageous, or dangerous things you sometimes picture in your mind. Remember that anxiety is disturbing but not dangerous. Take comfort in the fact that while you may be feeling shaky, your inner anxiety is rarely apparent to others.

7.       Catch Your Disturbing Thoughts as They Occur: "What if this elevator gets stuck?" is a thought. A thought of this kind will produce fear levels because you are sensitized. Even though such thoughts may be fleeting and barely noticeable, they can startle and frighten you all the same. Try to identify such thoughts as they occur, before your fears become intense. Once you recognize it as only a thought, you can begin to focus on comforting realities in the present, such as, "the elevator seems to be operating properly right now," or ,"there is sufficient air to breathe in any elevator," or, "I now have skills to better manage my anxiety levels."

8.       Separate Thoughts from Feelings: Thought is internal speech--what we tell ourselves. Feelings are made up of sensations experienced in some part of the body. "I feel I can't breathe" is really a thought, which may follow the feelings of tension in your neck, throat, and chest. The thought "I feel I can't breathe" makes the feelings of tension seem dangerous, and starts a series of scary future thoughts. Instead, try saying, "Although I feel that I can't breathe, I know that this is just a thought that seems scary because of the tension in my body. I know that my breathing will take care of itself automatically, so I can concentrate on using my skills to help bring my anxiety down."

9.       Find the "Trigger" to Your Panic Spiral: Despite what you might sometimes feel, your panic does not come "out of the blue." In truth, it comes from a rapid interplay between thoughts and feared feelings. They may surprise you because you do not become aware of the spiral until your fear level gets very high. Learn to identify the "trigger" to this spiral, so you can begin to manage your fear when your number is a one or two, before it increases to a high level.

10.   Stay inside yourself: Your tendency may be to think for others, to imagine how they perceive you. If you find that you are "looking" at yourself through the eyes of others around you, it is a sign that you are getting outside of yourself. Pay attention to how others look to you, notice what colors they are wearing, and whether you like the style of clothing they have on. Focus on what you think, not what others may be thinking.

11.   Remember to Take Care of Yourself: Define and limit your job. Don't try to manage the whole world. That will only increase your feelings of being overwhelmed. Let the pilot take care of the plane and let the driver take care of the bus. Your job is to take care of yourself. Make yourself comfortable, monitor your anxiety level, and do manageable things in the present.