Many aspects of daily life can leave you feeling anxious. The combination of high demands at work and home, compounded by experiences of microaggressions, traumatic events, and moral injury can result in chronic levels of stress. Physically, you are likely to have higher cortisol production and experience tension in your muscles. Socially, your relationships may be negatively impacted as you may not feel you have the energy or time to spend with others. And when you do spend time with others, anxiety may leave you feeling drained or distracted.
Many helpful anxiety management strategies target physical stress reduction. Examples include: deep breathing and progressive muscle relaxation. Though created initially to help people during the Covid-19 pandemic, the Veteran Affair’s free COVID Coach app is one option to help walk you through such strategies (Jaworski et al., 2021). It has many evidence-based techniques in the app’s Manage Stress section (https://mobile.va.gov/app/covid-coach).
Another way to cope with anxiety is to examine your thoughts. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) is an evidence-based way to help individuals manage and reduce anxiety, as well as perfectionism (Kaczkurkin and Foa 2015, 337-346). CBT includes helping individuals recognize and reframe the unhelpful thoughts that may be fueling their anxiety.
A helpful way to approach managing anxious thoughts includes Catching the thought, Checking the thought for unhelpful thinking habits (i.e., cognitive distortions), and Changing the thought into one that is more balanced and realistic.
An Example:
- Catch: Recognized the negative thought, “All of my performance evaluations will be negative.”
- Check: This thought includes negative prediction and all or nothing thinking. There may be an underlying worry of getting fired (catastrophizing) or assuming others won’t like you (mindreading).
- Change: A more realistic thought would be, “I may have negative performance evaluations and if I do, I can likely learn and grow from them.”
If you are struggling with anxiety reach out for help. The above strategies will hopefully provide you some ideas to consider when seeking care.
References
Jaworski, B. K., Taylor, K., Ramsey, K. M., Heinz, A., Steinmetz, S., Pagano, I., Moraja, G., & Owen, J. E. (2021). Exploring usage of COVID Coach, a public mental health app designed for the COVID-19 pandemic: Evaluation of analytics data. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 23(3), Article e26559. https://doi.org/10.2196/26559
Kaczkurkin, Antonia N., and Edna B. Foa. (2015). Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Anxiety Disorders: An Update on the Empirical Evidence. Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience 17 (3): 337-46. https://doi.org/10.31887/DCNS.2015.17.3/akaczkurkin