You’re sitting on the couch watching your favorite TV show, suddenly your heart starts racing, your palms start to sweat, and you feel like you want to run screaming out of the room. You look around to see if something is wrong, however you cannot find anything wrong. What’s happening? It is most likely generalized anxiety, a member of the family of anxiety disorders.
Anxiety disorders, which include agoraphobia, social anxiety, generalized anxiety, and specific phobias, affect an estimated 19 million people. The symptoms can be frightening and debilitating. Some of the physical symptoms may include: increased heart rate or palpitations, sweating, chills, restlessness and insomnia; while mental symptoms may include fear of “going crazy” or fear of self-harm or suicide.
While medications, such as anti-anxiety medications or antidepressants, are helpful in treating anxiety disorders; There are also some things that each person can do to help control their symptoms.
One thing an individual can do is 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 false message that is repeated over and over in our heads. The more we hear this message, the more we believe it to be true. For example, if someone has a specific phobia of dogs, the mistaken belief may be that all dogs bite. Rationally, you may be aware that this is not true, all dogs can bite, that does not mean that all dogs bite. However, when anxiety and panic invade you, you cannot think rationally, it is when you trust your belief (in this case, a wrong belief). Since you are already afraid of dogs, when you find yourself in an anxiety-provoking situation, the mistaken belief that all dogs bite only serves to increase your anxiety level.
To counter your erroneous beliefs it is important to be able to create corrective positive affirmations. A positive affirmation is your way of “rewriting” on your inner tape that contains the erroneous belief. For example, if you are afraid of dogs, a positive statement might be “Some dogs are nice.” This qualifies to contradict your erroneous belief while still being a positive statement! Use your positive affirmations in situations where you may feel your anxiety rising. Over time you should see a decrease in your anxiety in that situation!