ANXIETY CYCLE

Stuck in an anxiety cycle

It is helpful to understand both what the anxiety cycle is and how it works to keep us locked inside it. Human beings are complicated there isn’t one solution, to get to know many parts of us, anxiety being one such part which can cause real problems in our everyday lives.

For example, a panic attack turns into an anxiety disorder because of the way we react and then continue to react to it as panic and anxiety work in a cycle of thoughts, feelings and behaviours working closely together a bit like a chain link, they need to feed off each other to be effective in their job.

Everything that you do to instinctively rid yourself of these symptoms, works against you and will have the opposite effect of keeping you stuck in the cycle. It needs your fear, your resistance to feel it and your instincts to want to protect yourself from it to survive.

You can become convinced that you are in some sort of life threatening danger, heart attack, going crazy, develop a terrifying mental illness, stop breathing or collapse, feelings of intense physical symptoms and become overwhelmed by them so you focus on the symptoms and begin to become obsessed with when they may next strike.

It can become distorted and doesn't make sense, to be able to step out of and begin to see it for what it is, a build-up of very intense feelings, yes, it is uncomfortable and holds no real threat to us created in our mind and forming a habit with.

Once you learn to stand back, you will realise you can step in and out of this and concentrate on your surroundings deciding that you are not going to pay it attention at that moment.

When you have anxiety, your brain is logically trying to solve your problem, the brain is a logical organ which will always try to solve a problem if you have one, it takes time to go over things repeatedly to find a solution and in most cases this is a very helpful thing to do.

If anxiety was the problem that the brain was trying to solve then this would be a hindrance more than a help, the more you ruminate the longer you stay stuck.

This belief that there is something wrong causes you to begin to limit your life as you think this will help you avoid this fear again however this avoidance will keep you stuck and gradually make you feel worse.

The fear you are feeling feels very real, however it cannot and will not hurt you at all, it feels horrible, but it is harmless.

Avoidance of any kind, and that includes yourself and your own feelings will keep this cycle going and bring more anxious feelings not less. You must allow yourself to feel your feelings and allow them to come, not resist them.

 Feelings cannot be processed until they are felt, and they must process to go away, anxiety is a suppressed emotion and so to be released from its grip you must allow this emotion to come and let yourself feel it.

Overtime to leave the why, what and how's behind and concentrate on where you are now and how to move forward can be the way to facilitate remission of symptoms, to let go and resist the need to feed this symptom to begin to feel more able to cope with the anxiety you are feeling.

The good news is that once we start to understand and observe how we are reacting to anxiety, we can create a space to begin to assert some choice and control over it.

Therapy helps by providing tools to identify, understand, and reframe negative thought patterns while developing healthier coping mechanisms.

It breaks the cycle of anxiety by helping confront fears, improve emotional regulation, and build long-term resilience.