My Anxiety
Handbook
Getting Back on Track
Sue Knowles, Bridie Gallagher
and Phoebe McEwen
Illustrated by Emmeline Pidgen
Jessica Kingsley Publishers
London and Philadelphia
CONTENTS
2. Understanding Where My Anxiety Comes From
3. Tackling Anxiety Head On: Avoiding Avoidance
4. Tackling Anxious Thoughts
5. Tackling Worries
6. Being Mindful
7. Soothing Your Threat System
8. Getting a Good Night’s Sleep
9. School, College and Exam Stress
10. Transitions
11. Getting Extra Help
12. Personal Experiences of Anxiety
13. My Anxiety Survival Plan
Useful Information
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
PREFACE
There are several reasons why we decided to write this book. We know how common anxiety is for young people and how difficult it can be to get help. We also know that different things work for different people (no one is the same), so we have tried to include lots of different techniques and strategies, so that you can see what works best for you. This book belongs to YOU (as long as you haven’t borrowed it from the library!) so feel free to highlight, underline and add post-its in when you are reading through and see bits that fit with you. Then, at the end of the book, you can put all these bits together in your Anxiety Survival Plan.
We wanted this book to echo our belief that anxiety is a normal, healthy, human emotion – but sometimes it can become so big that it can get in the way of everyday life. There are lots of quotes and personal experiences throughout the book, and Chapter 12 has young people’s stories about their anxieties, worries and learning to cope, which we hope you will find useful.
Whilst writing this book, we were very aware that we continue to experience our own anxieties. Recently, Bridie panicked after thinking that she had accidentally saved over Sue’s chapter; Sue had been anxiously waiting for an email reply from the publisher and jumping every time her phone beeped; and Phoebe was restless with apprehension and excitement – she had never helped to write a book before!
We hope that you find this book useful and we wish you all the best in your journey getting back on track.
Sue, Bridie and Phoebe
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Anxiety – The Basics
What exactly is anxiety?
Anxiety is what happens when our bodies think we are under threat. It’s a feeling that most people describe as unpleasant, but the physical sensations can actually be very similar to feelings of excitement. The difference when we’re anxious is that we also have anxious thoughts or interpret the feeling as “bad”. Other words that are commonly used to describe feeling anxious are “nervous”, “fearful” or “worried”.
Everyone responds a little differently when they are anxious. Some people feel anxiety mostly in their body with sensations in their stomach, chest and even sometimes in their arms and legs. Other people might say that anxiety is “in their head” because the main thing they notice is that their thoughts go very fast. These things happen in our body and our mind because when our body notices a “threat”, it responds in the way that it has since we were living in caves. Back then, we were threatened by predators and worried about being clubbed to death by other cavemen. Now, we might be more worried about exams and feel threatened by new groups of people. So, in the way that it has for eons, your brain uses the information collected by your eyes and ears to detect threats in your environment and, without consulting you, releases a number of chemicals that have immediate effects on both your body and the way that you think.
These chemicals affect your breathing, your digestion, heart rate, blood flow and muscle tension. The aim is to make you ready to get very far away from the threat quickly (flight), kick the hell out of that caveman (fight) or pretend you are dead so he goes away and leaves you alone (freeze). So, your heart rate and breathing speed up, your blood flows away from your internal organs and towards your arms and legs so they are ready for running or fighting and your muscles tense up ready to go. The unintended consequences can be that you feel tense and a bit sick, or get butterflies in your stomach. You could start to sweat and feel light-headed or a bit dizzy, even though you might be sitting still. All these reactions are super clever ways of your brain helping you to be ready and prepared to manage threat. However, as threats have changed significantly since this threat system evolved, these reactions are not as useful as they once were. If we don’t understand what our body is doing, then these reactions and the “symptoms” themselves can cause even more anxiety.
Some people experience anxieties every day; other people only feel anxious occasionally. Some people’s brains will kick off the chemical reactions much more easily than others. We think, from looking at the research, that this can be because they were either born with a sensitive threat system (genes) or because they have had more difficult and stressful experiences (environment) or both. We talk about this in more detail in Chapter 2. There are lots of individual differences, but what we know is that everyone experiences anxiety.
What happens when I’m anxious?
Anxious thoughts
When we are anxious, several things happen to the way we think. It becomes easier to think of negative rather than positive outcomes, we get stuck on “what if” questions, and our thinking brain shuts down and our threat brain (focused solely on survival) takes over. This means that we struggle to use the bits of our brains that usually would help us to solve problems and see the wider context, because these bits are offline whilst we manage the threat. Our anxious brains choose between “flight”, “fight” or “freeze” rather than from the full range of behaviours or responses that are usually available to us. This is a really effective way of dealing with physical threats that were common for cavemen, but it does not serve us so well in complex social situations that we find ourselves in now.
Anxious bodily sensations
Some of the sensations in the body that anxiety can create have already been mentioned. We can get butterflies, feel tense, or feel like we are going to faint. When the heart rate and breathing become very quick and thoughts are racing, people sometimes think that they are going to pass out, die or that they are losing control. Everyone feels a little different when they are anxious, but the main thing to remember is that these sensations