When people start to have anxiety problems they usually believe that anxiety itself is a problem. When anxiety becomes the focus of attention people overlook the actual fear or fears that create anxiety in the first place. The problem with this is that it often fails to activate problem solving, because the anxiety creates distractions from addressing the actual situation that is being avoided. People can successfully avoid treatment for panic by focusing on being anxious about being anxious, which ironically tends to generate more panic and amplify the belief that anxiety is indeed the problem. In some circumstances, because people have tried to get rid of their anxiety unsuccessfully, they believe that nothing can be done for their anxiety. Sometimes people get angry when anxiety treatments are presented as options, because they don’t want to be invalidated for their efforts to get rid of anxiety.
People have anxiety about all sorts of things: Losing people they love, sickness or illness, death; threats of losing power, status, money; being in situations that threaten physical integrity or safety, being humiliated or shamed in public, being verbally attacked, being fired, or loss. In a given situation coping well with these situations means incorporating some degree of acceptance, acknowledgement, and sadness. It also might activate problem solving, fixing, or making changes to prevent these things from happening in the future. This is what normal people do in normal situations, and creates understandable, realistic, and adaptive ways of coping. Community supports, problem solving, religious institutions, family, and other means of coming together helps people to naturally solve painful life circumstances and problems.
People that have a lot of problems with anxiety generally tend to have problems identifying and responding to the actual thing that makes them anxious. If you are afraid of having conflict, and then you tend to avoid people when conflict is present, and then you have anxiety because you have conflict, and then you blame your anxiety, and then you try to get treatment for your anxiety, you can create ways to avoid addressing the actual problem. For example, treating anxiety with relaxation techniques without actually looking at what it is about the conflict, exactly, that is making you so anxious evades problem solving. When “the problem” becomes “the anxiety” most people’s solutions are to get rid of how they feel, not to figure out how to deal with conflict. If you could figure out how to respond to conflict adaptively, chances are your anxiety will naturally go down.
You can’t address emotional problems by failing to identify the thing that evokes the emotion in the first place. Here are some brief questions to help you figure out your anxiety:
What is it about this situation that you are actually afraid of? What is the actual threat?
What is the realistic likelihood of this actually happening?
If you had to approach what you are afraid of, what uncomfortable sensations, emotions, or experiences would you have to be willing to tolerate?
If what you are afraid of is actually happening, how would you approach this situation effectively?
What is one adaptive, problem solving step that you could take?
What can you do to validate the pain or difficulty of this situation to yourself?