There are several suggested ways on how to fight anxiety. Trigger factors of anxiety can be physical or mental. So in order to minimize, if not totally eliminate anxiety, the person has to learn to manage the specific causes of his condition.
Anxiety can be a manifestation of a person’s reaction to mental stress as in the case of financial burden, failure of a relationship or threats to life. Physical factors may include ailments such as heart diseases, asthma, or the use and abuse of drugs like cocaine, amphetamines or even caffeine. Some people even experience anxiety even when trying to withdraw from these drugs.
Psychotherapists have come up with scientifically proven methods on how to fight anxiety. Drug therapy is one of these methods. Drug therapy is a form of therapy wherein medications such as antidepressants and anxiolytics are prescribed to help relieve the physical and mental symptoms of anxiety. Typically, they are not the first-line treatment. They are just recommended as adjunct to psychotherapies. They only provide temporary relief from the symptoms of anxiety. It can also cause undesirable side effects such as dizziness, nausea, irritability, and can also cause drug dependency to a point of addiction.
The best solution on how to fight anxiety is to know what exactly caused the anxiety in the first place and to treat that cause properly. One should seek the help of a licensed professional who can guide him through recovery by applying several scientifically proven methods designed according to his own capacity.
Two methods are highly recommended: exposure therapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy.
In exposure therapy, the person is made to confront the source of his anxiety. He will be relieving the traumatic experience through remembering disturbing thoughts, confronting traumatic situations and facing feared objects in a gradual and controlled manner. He will learn by this experience that his fears are unfounded and will eventually diminish. Through the assistance of an expert, he is encouraged to talk about his fears and anxieties in the hope that he will learn to face these stressful emotions.
Meanwhile, cognitive-behavioral therapy is the most widely-used treatment option particularly effective in the treatment of anxiety disorders. The patient is taught to acknowledge his fears and to control and manage the reactions to the stimulus. It is based on the belief that individual thinking patterns affect how one feels and reacts to a particular situation. It supposes that the negative thinking patterns fuel the corresponding negative emotions of fear and anxiety. Its goal then is to change the way you perceive situations and things so that you may change the way you feel.
Recovery may take time for people who undergo these therapies. It is because the root of the anxiety is dug, studied and understood so that the problem will be addressed accordingly. These therapies do not offer or promise “quick fix”, unlike anti-depressant and anti-anxiety prescription drugs that never really address the cause of the problem, only control the symptoms. What the results of these therapies promise though is a depressed-free and anxiety-free life.
