Don't let your anxiety control you. Let's start by talking about what anxiety sensations feel like. The sensations are generally both emotional and physical. The emotional sensations involve fearfulness. Often you feel like there is something you cannot do - or that if you attempt doing it, you will suffer embarrassment and you imagine that something terrible will happen should you find yourself in this situation. Your thoughts about yourself are negative. "It's impossible. I won't. I can't."
Your symptoms may also be physical as you suffer sweating, heart palpitations and shakiness. Often people will go to an emergency room with the certainty that they are having a heart attack. The symptoms are often superficially similar.
When you are suffering with anxiety, your reactions may be normal. If, for example, if you are being chased by a wild animal, it is important that you experience nervousness so that you can can make helpful decisions regarding "fight or flight." On the other hand, your symptoms may represent clinical mental health issues that interfere with your ability to live your usual productive life. I think in clinical terms when I see severe persistent worry, avoidance of doing things that you associate with your anxiety with such avoidance lasting for an unusually long time.....many days, weeks or months.
The good news is that your anxiety can be treated. Exposure therapy and cognitive behavior therapy are useful techniques to reduce stress. Exposure therapy involves putting yourself in situations that normally cause tension Do this in small increments so that you can become calm using these emotional baby steps. Cognitive behavioral therapy involves exploring your thought patterns and distorted beliefs that tend to increase the stress you feel.
Other things to reduce your tension are:
1. Making a list of your worries,
2. Separate the worries over those which you probably have control from the worries over which you have no control at all.
3. When you identify worries over which you have power, use that power and act in your own best interests.
4. Recognize that anxiety is normal and often helpful.
5. Do those things that tend to make you feel uncomfortable and pay attention to how your discomfort decreases with your exposure to it.
6. Remind yourself that your problems do not have to be solved with immediacy. You have thinking time to make decisions about your most helpful reactions.
If you feel sad, allow yourself to feel sad. If you feel anxious, allow yourself to feel anxious. So much anxiety is caused by resistance to what is. I am pleased to assist you if doing these things on your own does not reduce your anxiety;