You are sitting on the sofa watching your favorite TV show, suddenly your heart starts to race, your palms start to sweat, and you feel as though you want to run screaming from the room. You look around you to see if anything is wrong, however you can find nothing amiss. What is happening? It is most likely generalized anxiety, a member of the anxiety disorder family.
Anxiety disorders, which include agoraphobia, social anxiety, generalized anxiety, and specific phobias, affect approximately 19 million people. The symptoms can be both scary and debilitating. Some of the physical symptoms can include: increased heart rate or palpitations, sweating, chills, restlessness, and insomnia; while the mental symptoms can include fear of “going crazy” or a fear of causing harm to oneself or suicide.
While medication, such as anti-anxiety or anti-depressants, is helpful in treating anxiety disorders; there are also some things that each person can do to help control their symptoms.
One thing that an individual can do is to take a look at their mistaken beliefs and how they are affecting their anxiety. A mistaken belief is much like a tape recorder with a message that is untrue repeating over and over in our head. The more we hear this message the more we believe it to be true. For example, if someone has a specific phobia of dogs a mistaken belief may be that all dogs will bite. Rationally you may be aware that this is not true, all dogs can bite, that does not mean all dogs will bite. However when anxiety and panic sets in you cannot think rationally, that is when you rely on your belief (in this case a mistaken belief). Since you are already afraid of dogs, when you are in an anxiety inducing situation, the mistaken belief that all dogs will bite only serves to increase your level of anxiety.
To counteract your mistaken beliefs it is important to be able to create corrective positive affirmations. A positive affirmation is your way for “rewriting” over your internal tape that holds the mistaken belief. For example, if you are afraid of dogs a positive affirmation may be “Some dogs are nice”. This meets the qualifications for contradicting your mistaken belief while remaining a positive statement! Use your positive affirmations in situations where you can feel you anxiety rising. Over time you should see a decrease in your anxiety in that situation!
