The symptoms of anxiety can have a significant impact on how a person behaves and goes about their daily life. The essence of anxiety is worrying about some potential threat. It is trying to cope with a future event that you think will be negative.

You do this by paying more attention to possible signs of potential threat, and looking internally to see whether you will be able to cope with that threat. When you notice your anxious symptoms, you think that you can’t cope with the situation, and therefore become more anxious.

How Avoidance Contributes to Anxiety

As your anxiety increases, you try to reduce the anxiety and prevent what you think might happen by avoiding the situation. If you cannot avoid the situation, then you use subtle avoidance to reduce the anxiety. For example, you may use certain rituals, like standing close to a door to make a quick escape. In some way, you might feel less anxious when you engage in avoidance behaviours.

However, when you have to deal with the situation the next time, you are less confident that you can cope with it because you avoided it the last time or become dependent on safety behaviours. So you feel more anxious. As a result, you avoid the situation or engage in subtle avoidance.

Safety Behaviours and Anxiety

If you feel anxious, or anticipate feeling anxious, it makes sense that you will do things to reduce your anxiety. In addition to avoidance and subtle avoidance, many people use “safety behaviours” to help cope with anxiety. These may include -

Using distraction to avoid feeling anxious or thinking about anxiety (e.g. always keeping busy or eliminating free-time)
Always having an exit plan for potentially-anxious situations
Making sure you have someone else with you.
Engaging in excessive research prior to taking a trip, starting a new job, buying something, all to ensure nothing will go wrong

These safety behaviours also play a part in maintaining the vicious cycle of anxiety. When you become dependent on them, it can be more distressing if one day they are not available to you.

Reversing the Vicious Cycle of Anxiety

Vicious cycles play an important role in maintaining anxiety. However, like the vicious cycle of depression, you can turn around this cycle to create a positive cycle that will help you overcome anxiety.

One important step in this cycle is gradually confronting feared situations. This will lead to an improved sense of confidence, which will help reduce your anxiety and allow you to go into situations that are important to you.

Use “graded exposure” by starting with situations that are easier for you to handle, then work your way up to more challenging tasks. This allows you to build your confidence slowly, to use other skills you have learned, to get used to the situations, and to challenge your fears about each situational exposure exercise. By doing this in a structured and repeated way, you have a good chance of reducing your anxiety about those situations.

Coping Skills: Breathing & Thinking Better

When you are gradually confronting feared situations, there will be a short term increase in anxiety. This is normal— everyone feels anxious about doing things they fear. The important thing to remember is that you can learn other skills as alternatives to avoidance and safety behaviours.

Breathing: Anxiety is often associated with fast, shallow breathing, which contributes to the physical sensation of anxiety. By slowing down your breathing and using calming and relaxation techniques, you can reduce your anxiety.

Thinking: There are many types of negative thoughts which are associated with anxiety, such as “I will not be able to cope” or “I must avoid this situation.” Learning to challenge these thoughts with more balanced ones can help to reduce the experience of anxiety.

Four Steps to Reversing the Vicious Cycle of Anxiety

1. Confront feared situations without aid of safety behaviours

2. Short term - slight increase in anxiety,

then a decrease in physical symptoms

and attention scanning

3. Use of coping skills, anxiety reduces

to manageable level

4. Greater belief in ability to

control own responses

Tip 1: Recognize when you're stressed

It might seem obvious that you’d know when you’re stressed, but many of us spend so much time in a frazzled state that we’ve forgotten what it feels like when our nervous systems are in balance—when we’re calm yet still alert and focused.

Recognize stress by listening to your body

When you're tired, your eyes feel heavy and you might rest your head on your hand. When you're happy, you laugh easily. And when you’re stressed, your body lets you know that too. Get in the habit of paying attention to your body’s clues.

Observe your muscles and insides. Are your muscles tense or sore? Is your stomach tight, cramped, or aching? Are your hands or jaw clenched?

Observe your breath. Is your breath shallow? Place one hand on your belly, the other on your chest. Watch your hands rise and fall with each breath. Notice when you breathe fully or when you "forget" to breathe.

Tip 2: Identify your stress response

Internally, we all respond to the “fight-or-flight” stress response the same: blood pressure rises, the heart pumps faster, and muscles constrict. Your body works hard and drains your immune system. Externally, however, people respond to stress in different ways.

The best way to quickly relieve stress often relates to your specific stress response:

Overexcited stress response/HYPERAROUSAL – If you tend to become angry, agitated, overly emotional, or keyed up under stress, you will respond best to stress relief activities that calm you down.

Underexcited stress response/HYPOAROUSAL – If you tend to become depressed, withdrawn, or spaced out under stress, you will respond best to stress relief activities that are stimulating and energizing.

Tip 3: Bring your senses to the rescue

To use your senses to quickly relieve stress, you first need to identify the sensory experiences that work best for you. This can require some experimentation. As you employ different senses (sight, hearing, touch, smell, taste), note how quickly your stress levels drop. What is the specific kind of sound or type of movement that affects you the most? For example, if you’re a music lover, listen to many different artists and types of music until you find the song that instantly lifts and relaxes you.

Explore a variety of sensory experiences so that no matter where you are you’ll always have something you can do to relieve stress.

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