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What is Anxiety and stress and how our Counsellor Dr Matt Sharpe can help you

What is Anxiety and stress and how our Counsellor Dr Matt Sharpe can help you

Stressed, anyone? Anxious?
The answer to these questions is that a lot of us feel these ways, and too many of us feel these ways a lot of the time. Stress and anxiety, like fear, are natural responses to a sense of threat in the world. These feelings can motivate us to do things we need to do, and otherwise mightnโ€™t. But, experienced over prolonged periods of time, they become more problematic, both physiologically and psychologically.
When we are anxious, two things tend to happen, in terms of how we think about the world. What are these?
First, we become inclined to overestimate the extent of the threats or challenges we face. A big part of this is feeling like weโ€™re losing a sense of boundaries, and of control of whatโ€™s important.
Second, we tend to underestimate our resources and capacities to meet the challenges. Too much is happening, too fast, and we donโ€™t have enough time or energy to deal with all of it!
Adding 1 and 2 together, you can see that anxiety can quickly serve to make people feel less able to address the problems that are causing the stress, and more prone to avoidance and despondencyโ€”even feeling if their life is spiralling out of control.
How can we reduce anxiety, then, before this vicious cycle gathers too much momentum? Hereโ€™s two tips:

  1. Divide what we can control right now, from what we cannot. Maybe many bad things could happen in the future, if we donโ€™t perform as well as we wanted to. Maybe. But that is in the future. Who knows, then? Right now, we can only do what we can: and that will give us the best chance of success, moving forwards. As for the rest, regrets about the past and worries about possible futures, it is good to learn techniques to identify and let these thought patterns go, so we can redirect our problem-solving energies to things we might be able to do now.
  2. Given that anxiety leads us to overestimate the threats we faceโ€”itโ€™s all too much!โ€”it is a good thing to identify and list all of the different things that are stressing us out. Get them right out there, even on paper if this helps.
  3. Externalising the lot of them, putting them on paper, allows us to look at the worries weโ€™ve been carrying around inside ourselves as, well, outside ourselves. We get some distance, and can go from being flooded by them all in our own heads, to being able to break down the problems, one by one, with somebody else. Often, also, the big problems which are stressing us outโ€”itโ€™s impossible, too much, where could I even start?โ€”are each just a lot of little problems in a sequence or a bundle. Yet, each of these little problems, taken by itself, we can easily enough handleโ€”and thatโ€™s an important, potentially empowering insight.

For once weโ€™ve got the things โ€œon our mindโ€ all out there in front of us, we can start to map out a schedule for addressing their moving parts, not all at onceโ€”itโ€™s too much! But one by oneโ€”OK, Iโ€™ve got this. All of a sudden, what seemed overwhelming in our heads, a gigantic mountain, starts to assume manageable dimensionsโ€”the mountain is just a sequence of molehills. And, from feeling powerless and overwhelmed, weโ€™ve started to take a bit of the power back from our anxiety.

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