Theraverse
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January 8, 2025
If I had a penny every time I heard someone diagnose themselves with a mental disorder that was not clinically verified, I would retire today!
We live at a time where information is readily accessible to pretty much anyone, while that has been highly efficient in generating awareness and providing psychoeducation, it also comes with the cost of people constantly wondering if they have what they are reading about. Each year 80% of patients use the internet for a health-related search. This makes it especially convenient for a patient to self-diagnose any concerning feelings they experience. And one of the most colloquially used and self-diagnosed mental disorders is anxiety. This term gets thrown around a lot especially on social media.
The point is not to deny or invalidate anyone’s experience here, because anxiousness is an emotion many of us relate to and often experience, it may even be helpful at times in providing motivation and anticipating contingencies. But it’s important to learn the difference between feeling anxious and anxiety as a disorder, as the latter is diagnosed by a mental health professional when patients experience intense and excessive fear, disproportionate to the stimulus which interferes with daily activities and impairs family, social and school/work life.
Before we go into some helpful techniques from cognitive-behavioral therapy which helps with anxiety, let’s quickly understand the symptomatology and few common types.
Symptoms
- Trouble concentrating or making decisions
- Feeling irritable, tense, or restless
- Experiencing nausea or abdominal distress
- Having heart palpitations
- Sweating, trembling, or shaking
- Trouble sleeping
- Having a sense of impending danger, panic, or doom
Here are few common types of anxiety disorders:
- Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)- persistent and excessive worry about daily activities or events
- Panic disorder – panic attacks
- Social anxiety disorder – high levels of fear and worry about social situations that might make the person feel humiliated, embarrassed or rejected
- Agoraphobia – excessive worry and avoidance of situations due to the fear of not being able to escape certain situations
CBT techniques that help with anxiety
- The thought-spiral Jar
- Write down daily uncertainties (e.g., “Will my boss like my presentation?”) on slips of paper and place them in a jar
- Once a week, revisit old slips and reflect on how the uncertainty resolved itself or became irrelevant
- This helps shift focus from trying to control uncertainty to accepting it
- Cognitive Defusion
- Imagine your anxious thought being spoken by a Fictional character (e.g., Mickey Mouse)
- Replay the thought in their voice until it feels less threatening
- It creates psychological distance from anxious thoughts and diminishes the thought’s emotional charge
- The “What-If” Scale
- When faced with a “what if” thought, rate it on a 1-10 scale of likelihood
- Then, rate how serious the impact would be if it happened
- Identify a small, actionable step to reduce the likelihood or impact
- This technique challenges cognitive distortions like catastrophizing while fostering problem-solving
- Chat with Anxiety
- Visualise your anxiety as a person; give it a name, a personality, a voice
- Now imagine sitting across the room from this character and have a dialogue about the situation
- This builds insight and helps externalize anxiety, making it less overwhelming
- Watch thoughts
- When thoughts come up – noticing them without engaging with them or feeding into them
- Like a passer-by standing on the pavement, watching the traffic, instead of walking into it, which could lead to accidents (anxiety)
- This video will help you understand this better
Here are 5 helpful tools/worksheets for Anxiety
- Anxiety – Insight building
- Social Anxiety
- Reframing unhealthy thoughts
- Understanding Cognitive distortions
- Mindfulness and breathing techniques
By,
Jensita Grace,
In-house psychologist, Talk Therapy Clinic
Resources:
https://www.therapistaid.com/therapy-worksheets
https://etactics.com/blog/self-diagnosis-statistics
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/anxiety-disorders
https://youtu.be/iN6g2mr0p3Q?si=fD7UjOtF8l_hjCLF
