An Anxiety Specialist’s Top 4 Tips

By Max Maisel, PhD Clinical Psychologist and Founder of Beachfront Practicing in Redondo Beach and Los Angeles, California

1. Recognize Avoidance

Nobody "likes" to feel anxious. In fact, your body tries to make anxiety as uncomfortable as possible with the purpose of motivating you to get out of dangerous situations! In fact, your body tries to make anxiety as uncomfortable as possible with the purpose of motivating you to get out of dangerous situations! Take a few moments to think about the various ways you respond to anxiety in an attempt to feel better, gain a sense of certainty, or make it go away. This could include avoiding specific situations or people, overanalyzing situations in your mind, reassuring yourself that everything will be okay, researching specific topics, seeking reassurance from others, choosing specific seats at a movie, and many more. Now, ask yourself how well these behaviors have worked for you. Maybe they provide temporary relief, but does your anxiety always come back? Also, consider what you have given up in life in order to keep anxiety at bay. The truth is, every time you engage in a behavior to temporarily reduce anxiety, you are teaching your brain that the perceived threat is real and dangerous. Your body never has a chance to learn that, eventually, the anxiety will go away on its own without you having to do anything about it. Additionally, your feared thoughts never have a chance to be disproven if you don't practice sitting with anxiety. Think about it like this: your overactive amygdala is telling you there is an emergency, and when you act on that emergency by trying to make the anxiety go down, you unintentionally reinforce the notion that it was a real threat! If your brain could talk after you engage in avoidance behaviors, it would say something like, "Phew! We reduced the anxiety and we are still alive, hurray! If we hadn't made our anxiety go away, we probably would have died!" The next time your anxiety is triggered, it will feel even worse, and you will have an even stronger need to avoid or make it go away. This is how anxiety tricks you into giving away more and more of your life. Anxiety is like an insatiable monster that commands you to escape from it, or else something bad will happen.

To effectively combat this, a skilled anxiety specialist will equip you with an incredibly powerful tool to disempower the anxiety monster called exposure and response prevention, or ERP for short.

This method rewires your brain to learn that the "threat" is just a false alarm, allowing you to regain control over your life and navigate anxiety with ease. It involves gently and systematically facing your fears without trying to make the anxiety go away. Eventually, you will learn that you can handle the scary thoughts and feelings, and they will no longer bother you. Instead of feeding the anxiety monster, you will prove to yourself that the monster actually has no teeth, is harmless, and can no longer dictate how you live your life.

2. Work Effectively With Your Thoughts

Just as external triggers can activate your body's fight, flight, or freeze response, so can your thoughts! If you are hiking in the woods and have the thought, "I wonder if there is a bear up ahead," you may already send yourself into a panic without even seeing a bear. When you are anxious, your brain produces distorted and maladaptive thinking patterns and narratives.

The amygdala, the mind's fight-or-flight center, hijacks the frontal cortex of the brain, which is responsible for rational thinking, and sends messages of doom, gloom, and everything in between. To break the cycle of anxiety, effective therapy will involve identifying and changing negative thinking patterns that contribute to your anxiety symptoms.

3. Practice Mindfulness

The anxious mind is like a broken time machine. Before you realize it, your mind propels you into the future, worrying about every little thing that could go wrong. This time machine can also transport you into the past, replaying difficult conversations or contemplating how you may have messed up during the day. When you get entangled in these thoughts, not only do you feel poorly on the inside, but it's also easy to miss out on the present moment. Mindfulness is simply the act of making contact with the present moment, observing your experience as it is, rather than how your anxiety tells you it will be. It's the skill of recognizing when your anxiety time machine has taken over and gently redirecting your awareness back to the here and now.

Mindfulness-based techniques can be powerful tools in your anxiety-fighting arsenal by helping you center yourself and prevent getting caught in worry spirals.

4. Be Kind to Yourself

 It's easy to criticize yourself for being anxious all the time or to wonder where you went wrong in life. Many people feel weak or defeated, as if they are somehow broken for not having figured out how to overcome anxiety and worry. Unfortunately, when we speak to ourselves in harsh, critical ways, our brain can interpret it as a threat, leading to even more anxiety than before. Like avoidance, self-criticism fuels a vicious cycle. You can break free from this cycle by intentionally activating the brain's natural calming system, known as the parasympathetic nervous system.

By learning to speak to ourselves with gentleness, kindness, and compassion, we can teach our brain that we are indeed safe and create space to respond wisely to anxiety. Another benefit of self-kindness is that when we learn to love ourselves more fully, we generally feel more connected to others as well. 

Summary:

Anxiety is essentially our brain battling against itself. What may feel natural and right to do (avoiding, fighting anxiety, self-criticism, seeking certainty) actually prolongs its presence by teaching your brain that the "threat" is real. Fortunately, numerous psychological studies show that therapy can be incredibly effective in helping you heal and recover from anxiety disorders. You can begin to rebuild your life by redirecting all the energy spent battling anxiety towards nurturing relationships, pursuing values, and embracing passions that truly matter to you.

To learn more about ways that you can overcome anxiety or OCD, please reach to Beachfront Anxiety Specialists by calling (213) 218-3080  or by sending a message through the CONTACT PAGE. Clinicians treat anxiety online or in-person in our offices in Redondo Beach and Los Angeles, CA.