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Whether you call it fear, worry, or anxiety, it's a most unpleasant feeling. A vast amount of suffering comes from anxiety that is out of proportion to the danger one is in. Here are some of the most essential ideas about reducing anxiety. 1. An important first step is to get in touch with what you are afraid of: what situations, in reality or in the expected future, trigger the fear. 2. Decide how realistic your fears are, by trying to assess the danger you are in. If you are not in substantial danger, but you feel scared anyway, you can call the fear unrealistic and try to reduce the fear. On the other hand, if there is real danger, then your job is to protect yourself. 3. There is one aspect that almost all successful programs for fear-reduction have in common: prolonged exposure to the situation that made you scared. With prolonged exposure, people habituate to the situation, or get used to it. Quick exposures don't work because the fear-reduction that follows a quick escape from the situation reinforces escaping. And fear is the urge to escape. The exposure has to be long enough that the fear has time to go down, while exposure continues. 4. Exposure to the scary situation in fantasy reduces fear. If you rehearse in fantasy the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of handling the situation in a fearless way, you can probably reduce the discomfort of real-life exposure. 5. Practicing relaxation techniques (with or without biofeedback) helps you to get more voluntary control over the physical processes that constitute fear or fearlessness. 6. The things you say to yourself about the situation affect your emotions. If you are thinking, "This is going to be terrible," or if you are flashing across your imagination visual images of terrible outcomes, the situation is likely to scare you; if you are thinking, "I know how to handle this, and make it come out OK," you are less likely to feel so scared. In fantasy, you can rehearse the "not awfulizing" thoughts. 7. When building up a set of success experiences in dealing with situations that have caused you anxiety, it often is helpful to start with the mildly or moderately scary situations before working with the extremely scary ones. By working your way up the ladder of difficulty gradually, you can make it more likely that you'll be able to stay in the scary situations long enough to habituate to them. 8. If there are rewards that you get for avoiding the scary situation, see if you can eliminate them; see if you can rig up rewards for yourself for staying in the scary situation. For more information on overcoming anxiety, click on the link below: Courage Skills: A Chapter from Instructions on Psychological Skills
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