The anticipatory anxiety It is the feeling of nervousness that appears when we think about future events. Normally, this anxiety disorder is experienced when we are unable to control future events, and we have an excessively high need for everything to go well or we have little feelings of control.
In this way, the mere fact of not being sure about what will happen, causes us very high feelings of anxiety, which are experienced with great discomfort and can greatly affect our day to day. Therefore, the main cause of anticipatory anxiety is the feeling of lack of control, and concern about what may happen in the future.
Anticipatory anxiety appears in the moments prior to certain events in which the person experiences very high levels of tension and nervousness.
It usually appears in situations in which the person places high expectations on their own performance, and experiences fear of not achieving their goals, being ashamed or ridiculing themselves.
Some examples of anticipatory anxiety are those feelings of nervousness that appear before giving a presentation in public, traveling by plane or doing specific activities such as driving or going to work.
Obviously, a person who experiences anticipatory anxiety before getting into the car will have a certain fear of driving, and the one who experiences it before speaking in public will make them quite nervous to carry out these types of activities.
However, anticipatory anxiety does not appear while the dreaded action is taking place, but in the previous moments, in which the person does not stop thinking about the specific situation and feeling unpleasant sensations when imagining their failure.
This anxiety that is experienced in special situations does not always have to be pathological. What our body is doing in those moments is activating in an appropriate way to maximize performance.
However, when this activation is too high and anxiety rises rapidly to very high levels, nervousness can turn against us. It is at those times that we experience unpleasant sensations such as muscle tension and excessive sweating, palpitations, shaky voice, dizziness and nausea..
The appearance of all these symptoms are experienced with great discomfort and at the same time they cause us to lose our ability to perform adequately.
Thus, in these cases it is important to know how to properly cope with our state of activation, control our sensations and know how to manage our anxiety so that it does not represent a problem for us..
The first step in learning to properly control our anticipatory anxiety is knowing how to detect our thoughts.
If you suffer from this type of problem, you will surely know what are the situations that cause anticipatory anxiety and what thoughts come to your head in those moments.
Well, the first thing you will have to do is simply to detect and write down the type of thoughts you have in those circumstances. If you have a good memory and are able to remember them, you can start writing them down right now..
However, you will detect them much better if you do them "live", that is, if you are able to detect and record your thoughts just in those moments that appear..
The objective is for you to be able to detect all the negative thoughts that you have in all the situations that produce anticipatory anxiety, since they are responsible for originating the unpleasant feelings and sensations that you have in those moments.
Once you have them detected we can start working with them. As we have said, the origin of your anticipatory anxiety is in your thinking and in the negative or catastrophic forecasts that you make in your mind..
Your negative thoughts produce feelings of insecurity, beliefs that you cannot control the situation or ideas that things will not turn out the way you want.
However, the paradox is that most likely you yourself know that the thoughts you have in those moments are not entirely true, and that in those moments
situations you always have a tendency to put yourself in the worst.
Let's take an example, if you have anticipatory anxiety before going to work it is because you know that you will go to work, you will sit at your work place and you will have to carry out your work tasks.
In fact, you most likely do these activities every day, and every day you perform adequately, however, as soon as there is something important to do at work, anxiety appears before you go..
In this way, despite knowing that you will do your job properly, before you go you get nervous and in those moments you are not able to make such a rational assessment of what will happen as you are doing now that you are calmer.
Well, the objective is that if you are able to think more clearly in those situations that anticipatory anxiety appears, in such a way that your thinking is able to control your nervousness and not the other way around..
So, take the list of thoughts that you have done previously and propose a more rational and neutral thought for each of them..
The objective is that when a thought that causes anxiety appears, you have one or more alternative thoughts available that can compete with the negative thought and reduce your anxiety levels.
Once you have alternative thoughts for your anxious cognitions, you will already have material to begin to combat your anxiety. However, it is important that you know how to do it properly.
Alternative thoughts should be used in difficult times when anticipatory anxiety has probably already begun to bloom in you. In this way, in order to use them properly and be able to combat your negative thoughts, you must also know how to identify your emotions and your sensations..
What do you feel in your body when anxiety starts to come? What emotions do you feel in those moments? You must know yourself very well and you must know your anxiety response very well to be able to start working before she has taken over you..
In this way, when you identify the first symptoms of anxiety and the first negative thoughts, you can begin to combat each of them with your alternative thoughts..
Repeat the alternative thoughts to yourself over and over again and try to challenge your negative thoughts, in this way, you will be able to reduce the advance of your anxiety.
Another very useful exercise to reduce your anticipatory anxiety is to focus your attention on the things that you can control and divert it from those things that you have control over..
And is that the previous exercise can be very useful to reduce your anxiety in the initial moments, but if you continue to focus only on those thoughts you can get more nervous than you should.
So, direct your attention to those things that you know you can control, in this way, your doubts will disappear and you will have more confidence in yourself. For example, when you go to work you do not know if the day will go well or not, if the meeting will be a success, if everyone will like your presentation or if everything will be great..
However, you can control those things that you will do. You can control what you will say in the meeting, how you will make your presentation and what resources you will use so that everything goes well.
And in fact, what you do will depend only on these things that you can control, the rest you cannot control now or ever, so no matter how much you think about it, you will not draw any beneficial conclusions..
In this way, if you focus your attention on the things that you will do and not on external factors, you will realize that you have more control than you thought, so your feelings of anxiety will cease to make sense..
At the same time that you focus on the things that you can control, you have to accept that there are many things that are uncontrollable.
It is worthless if you focus on what you can control but you intend to want to control things that are uncontrollable. In this way, you must become aware and reaffirm the idea that there are things that do not depend on you.
Take some time to think about those situations that habitually produce anticipatory anxiety and analyze in a rational way which aspects you can control and which ones you cannot..
If you do this exercise when you are calm, it will be easy for you to quickly discern which aspects are beyond your control. Write them all down and use this material to analyze the situation in the same way that you do now when you start to have anxiety.
In this way, it will be easier for you to have a broader vision when your feared situation approaches and to optimally manage your anxiety states.
Another technique that you can use to reduce your anxiety in those moments that you get nervous is to perform relaxation exercises.
Taking a few minutes to relax when you start to feel anxious will not only relax your mind but also calm your entire body. You will be able to loosen your muscles, eliminate the nerves of the stomach, reduce your apprehension and reduce the discomfort you notice in your body.
However, depending on the situation you find yourself, it is not always easy to perform relaxation exercises, since you may not have the space or the time necessary to do it..
In these cases, a very simple exercise that you can use to reduce your feelings of anxiety is to perform a simple control of your breathing. So, sit in a chair or lie down somewhere comfortable if you have the chance and close your eyes gently.
Once you are comfortable, start to control your breathing by taking slow breaths through the nose for 8 seconds, hold the air for 8 more seconds and breathe out gently during the same time interval..
While doing this exercise it is very important that you focus your breath, noticing how the air enters and leaves your body. Likewise, you can repeat yourself the alternative thoughts previously made while you breathe.
Do this exercise for about 5 or 10 minutes when you feel very anxious and you will notice how you manage to release your body from nervousness.
Doing sports frequently is a practice that provides numerous physical and psychological benefits..
For example, the study carried out by Rejeski, Brawley and Schumaker in 1996 showed how frequent physical activity has beneficial effects in controlling anxiety.
Thus, incorporating physical activity into your lifestyle will not help you control anticipatory anxiety when it appears, but it will allow you to be less susceptible to it..
People who do physical activity frequently release their tensions more often and benefit more from the psychological effects of sport, so they are less likely to suffer from anxiety problems.
In this way, if you manage to incorporate the benefits of physical exercise to your mental well-being, anticipatory anxiety will have it more difficult to manifest..
Finally, one last exercise you can do to gain more control over your anticipatory anxiety is to intentionally expose yourself to uncontrollable situations..
You can expose yourself to any type of uncontrollable situation or directly expose yourself to those situations that cause you anticipatory anxiety.
Benefiting from exposure to those situations that cause anxiety is more complicated and it is usually necessary to do it through the help of a psychotherapist, who will guide the exposure and the cognitive and relaxation techniques to be carried out..
However, you can expose yourself to situations that do not directly cause anxiety but do have a significant uncontrollable component..
In this way, you will get used to working in situations in which you cannot control certain aspects and you will be able to put the previous exercises into practice, so that when you apply them to your real situations, you will have a greater number of management resources..
Yet No Comments