Do you suffer from any of the following symptoms of anxiety?
- Heart palpitations
- Muscle weakness and tension
- Fatigue, nausea
- Chest pain
- Shortness of breath, stomach aches, or headaches
- Panic attacks
- Sense of danger, dread or doom
Is this normal?
Anxiety is the body's response to real or perceived danger or threat. In nature, anxiety is dispelled by taking action. A deer flees its predator. A tiger attacks an opponent. Whether the response is fight or flight, the anxiety is dispelled by responding immediately to the situation.
Human beings, on the other hand, have developed complex social rules about feelings and behavior. We can’t run off the job when the workload overwelms us. We can’t tell a friend how jealous we are about his new boyfriend. In thousands of ways, we are managing ourselves, and the pent-up feelings involved can often turn into anxiety.
Treating Anxiety
In psychotherapy, there are top-down and bottom-up approaches.
A top-down approach assumes that anxiety is inevitable, and teaches ways to manage anxiety. People can learn breathing techniques, new ways to talk to themselves during a panic attack, and develop healthier lifestyles including regular sleep, eating well, and resisting overwork.
A bottom-up approach involves getting at the source of the anxiety. With exploration, clients sometime reveal they have overly perfectionistic standards for themselves, or associate a coworker's negative behavior with an abusive figure from the past. Sometimes people learn from their families that the expression of anger, joy or other feelings is dangerous. When these inevitable feelings occur, people can sometimes experience intense panic.
Treating anxiety usually involves an artful integration of first managing symptoms while beginning to address the underlying thinking patterns that contribute to the anxiety. This can lead to permanent improvement in symptoms.
Treating Anxiety with Medication
Some people suffering from anxiety seek psychiatric medication. There are some situations in which an ansiolytic (anti-anxiety) drug can be a temporary solution to a problem, such as an exaggerated grief response, or a stressful work assignment. In these cases, I work with a number of psychiatrists specifically trained in the appropriate use of medication for anxiety disorders.
My position is that anxiety disorders that require longterm medication are extremely rare. Many medications, especially those known as “benzos”, or benzodiazopenes, are extremely addictive, and can cause severe medical symptoms in the event of missing doses. I discourage people from using these as a first treatment, inviting people to address the psychological reasons for their anxiety. However, medication is sometimes necessary to give people the breathing room they need in order to address the psychological origin of their symptoms.