Shalini Singh, LMHC-D, NCC, C-DBT

What is Anxiety?

Anxiety is an emotional, mental, and physical experience. Anxiety can be helpful or unhelpful.

When is Anxiety helpful?

Anxiety can help a person identify a threat to their safety and propel them to fight or flee the situation. For example, if you were facing a life threatening situation, you may engage in fighting back or fleeing the situation. This is part of your natural stress response system. Your stress response system signals your body to do something to protect yourself from harm. Oftentimes, it is to either flee or fight back. Anxiety can also motivate people to perform well on tasks such as tests or presentations. Anxiety in these situations would propel a person to prepare for the tasks at hand, thus, serving as a motivating factor for a person.

When is Anxiety unhelpful?

Although anxiety can be helpful, it becomes a problem when anxiety contributes to poor quality of life. Some of the unwanted effects of anxiety include, but is not limited to; increased loneliness, poor quality of sleep, increased irritability, poor relationships, failing at school/college, or not being able to effectively perform at a job/career.

Unhelpful anxiety is unbearable. A person often feel intensely scared or worry that something horrible is about to happen to them. People often report they find it very hard to shut their mind off because they constantly think about everything that is going wrong in their life. Unhelpful anxiety is debilitating, exhausting, and triggers people to engage in avoidance to cope.

It is natural that people engage in avoidance to cope, because who wants to feel so anxious that it leaves them feeling defeated? No one. Although avoidance helps to calm anxiety in the moment, at best, it is a temporary fix to unhelpful anxiety. The constant avoidance of triggers and situations limits a person’s potential, and puts anxiety in the driver’s seat of a person’s emotions, thoughts and actions.

Imagine anxiety is not in control of your life anymore. That is what therapists hope to help you achieve by working with you to increase your insight into why anxiety is present as well as equipping you with useful skills to managing anxiety, so that you live your life at its best potential.

Some Common Signs of Anxiety:

• Uncontrollable worrying
• Unable to concentrate
• Increased Heart Rate
• Sweating
• Feeling restless or keyed up
• Feeling an intense fear of having an anxiety attack
• Experiencing muscle tension
• Uncontrollable Trembling/Shaking
• Experiencing poor quality of sleep
• Feeling like a pending doom is about to happen

Some common anxiety disorder examples include:

• Generalized Anxiety Disorder
• Social Anxiety Disorder
• Specific Phobia
• Agoraphobia
• Panic Disorder

If you have identified any of the above symptoms of anxiety, don’t hesitate to reach out. You will learn how to manage anxiety so that it doesn’t dictate the outcomes of your life.

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