Anxiety is more than just feeling worried or stressed out. Anxiety is the most common mental health concern in Australia. It is something that we all suffer from time to time when the heat is on. If you take any group of four people, at least one person is likely to be inflicted with severe anxiety. One in five men and one in three women will experience anxiety over the next 12 months. For some, it will plague them throughout their lives, especially if they don’t know how to get help, or even know that they are suffering from severe anxiety.
Severe anxiety is when those nervous feelings won’t go away. Instead they linger on without any apparent reason. Or sometimes the reason is apparent but the reaction to it is over the top. It may be impossible to concentrate. You may yell or scream at your loved one, be very abrupt with a person serving you in a shop, rage at the traffic or get defensive with a friend. Our reactions to these situations can leave us feeling guilty and create isolation and distance from loved ones and friends. Or we may totally withdraw just to manage, which of course only makes things worse. Because when guilt and isolation steps in, it is normally accompanied by feelings of being overwhelmed, worthlessness and nagging self-doubt. The tendency to ruminate and beat ourselves up, takes up all our energy, as we are just trying our hardest to manage negative repeating thoughts. Sometimes there are crippling physiological symptoms. Afterwards, we can feel exhausted for days.
CAN WE GET RID OF ANXIETY?
As you can see, severe anxiety is very common and also very debilitating. The good news is that it is also very treatable. I am very passionate about treating anxiety. I get to see the rewards frequently – when people learn a different way to relate to their anxiety so that it no longer rules them. It is life changing.
The way anxiety shows for people is very individual. But there are a lot of common themes that run through people’s anxiety. For instance, the Monkey Mind. Buddha described the human mind as being filled with drunken monkeys, jumping around, screeching, chattering, carrying on endlessly. We all have monkey minds, Buddha said, with dozens of monkeys all clamouring for attention. Fear is an especially loud monkey, sounding the alarm incessantly, pointing out all the things we should be wary of and everything that could go wrong. This is how we have learned to treat it.
My experience over the last two decades of doing therapy is that using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), has a lot of mindfulness similarities. They complement each other. Teaching people self-compassion and mastering the monkey mind, liberates people.
The other bonus is that, in my experience, people tend to pick this stuff up fairly quickly. So we are not usually talking about years in therapy or even months. I am really passionate about helping people to manage their anxiety and end their suffering. So please make time to see me. Let me help you to see that there is a whole world out there for you to explore with the monkey mind playing nicely, rather than having you believe that everything will go terribly wrong. There is always a good chance that it will go very right!
P.S. I have included a video from Russ Harris about anxiety as I think it has a great message. I have trained with Russ Harris to a mastery level in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. He really is a gifted teacher and I am pleased to have been one of his students.
REFERENCES:
BeyondBlue (2018). Beyondblue.org.au
https://youtu.be/rCp1l16GCXI Russ Harris. AnxietyGallanger,BJ.,(2011) Buddha:How to tame your monkey Mind. Retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost.com/bj-gallagher/buddha-how-to-tame-your-m_b_945793.html
