Anxiety: what helps?

Anxiety is a perfectly normal and helpful emotion. Very similar to fear, anxiety helps prepare our mind and body for potential threats. The problem is, our brains are very clever and are very good at identifying and ruminating on these possible threats. And whilst we do need anxiety, to a degree, a very large proportion of the world’s population understands what it means for anxiety to become a debilitating problem that impacts their wellbeing and daily functioning (World Health Organisation, 2023).

The good news is, thanks to how common it is, we have come to understand a lot about anxiety. This means we also have lots of ideas about how to help transform unhelpful anxiety back to its original purpose. Some of these ideas focus on targeting anxious thoughts, some ideas focus more on unhelpful behaviours, some ideas use the body to help manage the effects of anxiety and other ideas aim to normalise, de-shame and use compassion to bring anxiety back to a healthier state. This is just a taste of the options out there and different ideas work for different people.

On our website we have workshops that are dedicated to understanding anxiety and finding new ideas that can help you. This can be a great starting point if you are looking to prevent anxiety growing into a bigger problem in your life.

References:

World Health Organisation. (2023, September 27). Anxiety disorders. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/anxiety-disorders