How To Respond To Your Anxiety In 4 Steps

How do I get rid of my anxiety? How do I make it go away? Why can’t I just snap out of it? 

The answer is, you don’t. Counterintuitive - right? It’s reasonable to not want to feel uncomfortable, unpleasant physical sensations or panicky feelings. Who wants that? But as you probably already know, when you resist these feelings, they intensify. 

The good news is, there’s something you can do about it. While we can’t prevent a thought or feeling, we can change how we respond instead of adding fuel to the fire. 

Step 1: Label it. 

Label your emotions and thoughts. You are assigning them a name so that your brain can recognize what they are - a thought and an emotion - not a reality. 

To label your emotion, it might look like: “this is making me feel anxious” or “I’m having anxiety right now”. To label your thoughts, it might look like: “I’m having an anxious thought,” or “The idea of X is making me feel anxious right now.” 

Step 2: Disengage 

Anxiety wants you to act with a sense of urgency. It will tell you to ask someone for excessive reassurance, or check something, over and over again. By doing this, you are playing a losing battle of tug of war with your anxiety.

Instead, drop the rope and disengage from the content of your anxious thoughts.

It can look like - “I accept that I’m having these feelings, and I can handle them.” Or, “I accept that bad things could happen.” By doing this, anxiety loses its power over you. 

Step 3: Tolerate the Discomfort 

Now that you’ve disengaged from your anxious thoughts, the emotions will likely intensify. Yup!! And now your job is to ride the wave of discomfort. 

It can look like - “although this is hard, I can tolerate it,” or, “I’m teaching my brain I can do this.” 

You’ve taught yourself you can handle unpleasant feelings, and you don’t need to push them away. You’ve learned that your feelings, and many situations are in fact not dangerous. And you build the courage to do more hard things. Make sense?

Step 4: Check Your Intentions

Remember why you are here. What are your reasons for tolerating this fear?

Remind yourself that you won’t be able to turn the off switch for anxiety. Expect that anxiety will pay you more visits, and your job is to accept that, and be gentle with yourself.

Yes, it will bring discomfort. Yes, it requires work. Yes, it means that anxiety isn’t going to go away. It means you need to recalibrate your expectations about recovering with anxiety. 

Let’s unlearn, recover and live! You in?

© Copyright 2022 New Mindset CBT

Please note the following information is not intended to replace therapy and this resource is distributed free online solely for the purpose of psycho-education. If you are experiencing significant mental health concerns, particularly where your functioning has been impaired, it is strongly recommended you seek support in the form of appropriate psychotherapeutic treatment in your local area.