Anxiety Relief Tips & Strategies

If you suffer from General Anxiety Disorder, this is important news about the best way to recover.

A new series of studies conducted on 1,305 participants has shown that Cognitive Behavioral Therapy is one of the best ways to treat General Anxiety Disorder – a condition that affects 4 million Americans and many more worldwide.

It is more common in women than in men. It generally begins to develop in childhood and adolescence, but it can also start in adulthood.

The symptoms can be quite debilitating. Sufferers experience chronic and exaggerated worry seemingly without cause. For instance, they often worry about health, family, work, relationships and unforeseen disasters, among other things, many of them trivial and unimportant.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder can be accompanied by depression, substance abuse and other anxiety disorders, although it doesn’t necessarily share the same symptoms such as avoiding certain situations that are unrealistically threatening in some way.

Although GAD sufferers are aware that their anxiety is unwarranted, they cannot overcome the irrational thoughts. Symptoms can include:

• Trembling
• muscle tension
• headaches
• irritability
• lightheadedness
• difficulty breathing
• nausea
• feeling a lump in the throat
• inability to concentrate
• fatigue
• an inability to relax

This new study is great news, as it defines the most effective way of treating the condition.

Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) is a form of psychotherapy that emphasizes how our thinking affects how we feel and act. It’s goal is to identify and change distorted and unrealistic ways of thinking. CBT was developed by psychiatrist Aaron T. Beck in the 1960s. He understood that treating how a person perceives and interprets things is key to therapy.

The approach is to combine behavioral therapy with cognitive therapy.

Behavioral therapy involves learning how to change your behavior by implementing such things as desensitization, relaxation and breathing exercises.

The goal of cognitive therapy is to learn how to recognize and change that distorted thinking by gaining control over racing thoughts and repetitive thinking that often triggers anxiety and can even feed it.

The methods learned can be implemented during an extreme anxiety attack and thereby help calm you down and enable you to focus your thinking away from the anxiety.

While these are methods you can study on your own, practice and apply, sometimes it’s necessary to get the help of a therapist who can provide an opportunity for you to talk through your condition. This alone is extremely beneficial to your recovery. In some cases, medications might be prescribed along with the cognitive behavior therapy.

As for the study, it showed that of 46% of people undergoing CBT saw improvement in their anxiety symptoms, compared to 14% of those who were not undergoing CBT.

The key is to be motivated in your treatment, because CBT involves hard work. There will be times you’ll feel uncomfortable and begin to doubt the effectiveness of the treatment. It’s important to keep in mind that the harder you work, the sooner and more likely you will recover.

There are several programs available that are based on the cognitive behavior approach. One that I highly recommend is The Linden Method. Many people have expressed tremendous success using this method. It was developed by an ex-anxiety sufferer who has done extensive research and set up his business to include one-on-one counseling for those using his program. You can read my review of his program at http://www.book-titles.ca/lindenmethod.htm