Coping With Anxiety

Irina Gusakova

In recent months, due to the news, many have been stressed, people are worried about the future, they are afraid for their loved ones, they are worried about rising prices. Anxiety can be different: causeless, constant, debilitating or short-term, burning, bright. Psychologist, author of the Telegram channel "How I found out that I have an autistic with ADHD" Slava Donin shared with Pravda.Ru readers effective exercises that will help to cope with any manifestations of anxiety.

To date, the most effective method of rapid emotional regulation is dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT). The method has an extensive evidence base and is one of the most popular psychotherapeutic approaches in the West.

The practice consists of five steps that help you return to the "here and now" state, cope with a panic attack and distract yourself from fixation on unpleasant experiences. When performing the technique, it is important to shift your attention from the inner to the outer. 

Take a good look around and find. Five things you can see, four things you can touch, three things you can hear, two things you can smell and one thing you can taste. Practice will help to cope with deep affective states, when experiences are clearly reflected in the body by lack of air, tremors, suffocation, and disorientation.

In such cases, you need to "cool off": dip your face in ice water for 30 seconds or attach something from the freezer to the area of \u200b\u200bthe body between the neck and the back of the head. Then you need to do some kind of active exercise for 10 minutes: run up the stairs or in place, do push-ups, squat.

Next, you need to calmly breathe for 10 minutes - inhale for 5 counts, exhale for 7 counts. Thus, you slow down the metabolism in the body and reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the blood, the excess of which causes increased sweating, dizziness, and nausea. The final step in the TIRR technique is stretching or yoga. 

It is important to understand that often people with psychological personality disorders have a fear of fear itself. For example, nothing threatens their lives in reality, but an imaginary threat captures consciousness so strongly that an alarm trigger is triggered in the body.

If you often worry, then your brain lives in a mode of constant survival and expectation of something bad. This leads to a narrowing of consciousness: a person commits irrational acts and avoids any actions that, in his opinion, can lead to an oversight. 

Exercise for unreasonable anxiety. For example, you are worried that there will be a crisis soon. You need to catch this thought "by the tail" and become, as it were, an outside observer. First, you say out loud what is bothering you: "I have a disturbing thought in my head that there will be a crisis soon. I notice that my brain is sending me this idea." Thus, you take a meta-position and look at what is happening from the outside, without getting involved in unpleasant feelings. 

Then you can continue the dialogue with the subconscious and ask him clarifying questions: "And what other options are there for the development of events? And what is the next thought? And what's next?" You need to ask the brain to "roll out" the entire list of exciting ideas and determine the level of scale and reality of each of them.

-- Pravda.ru