Tag Archive for: anxiety

Can’t Decide? It Might be Anxiety

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By Jillian Irwin, LMFT | Counseling

Decision-making is a fundamental aspect of daily life, but for some individuals, it can become a source of stress and uncertainty. The struggle to make decisions, especially significant ones, may indeed be linked to anxiety. Here’s a closer look at how anxiety can impact decision-making processes.

Indecision and Anxiety

Anxiety can manifest in various ways, and one common symptom is indecisiveness. Individuals with anxiety may find it challenging to make decisions due to several factors:

  • Overthinking – Anxiety often leads to excessive worry and overthinking, making it difficult to weigh options and come to a conclusion.
  • Fear of Making Mistakes – Anxiety can create a fear of making the wrong decision, leading to hesitation and second-guessing.
  • Perfectionism – Some individuals with anxiety have high standards for themselves and fear that their decisions won’t meet these standards, leading to indecision.
  • Anticipatory Anxiety – This is anxiety about anxiety. The anticipation of potential negative outcomes can paralyze decision-making, as the individual becomes focused on avoiding perceived risks.

Impact on Daily Life

Difficulty making decisions due to anxiety can have significant consequences in various areas:

  • Personal Life – Simple decisions like what to eat or wear can become overwhelming, leading to procrastination or avoidance.
  • Work or School – Choosing projects, tasks, or making career-related decisions may be challenging, affecting productivity and progress.
  • Relationships – Anxiety-driven indecision can strain relationships, as the inability to make choices or express preferences may lead to misunderstandings or conflict.
  • Emotional Well-being – The constant stress of decision-making can contribute to increased anxiety levels and lead to other emotions such as guilt, helplessness or frustration. This can affect overall mental health and well-being.

If anxiety is affecting your ability to make decisions or has other impacts on your daily life, you’re not alone. According to the National Institute for Mental Health, nearly 20% of adults in the United States have some kind of anxiety disorder. For mild cases of anxiety, you can try to manage your symptoms at home.

Addressing Decision-Making Challenges

Managing anxiety-related decision-making difficulties involves a multi-faceted approach:

  • Recognize Anxiety – Acknowledge that anxiety may be contributing to indecisiveness and seek support from mental health professionals for assessment and guidance.
  • Practice Mindfulness – Mindfulness techniques can help reduce anxiety levels, improve focus, and promote clearer thinking during decision-making.
  • Set Realistic Expectations – Challenge perfectionistic tendencies by setting realistic expectations for decisions and accepting that not all outcomes will be perfect.
  • Seek Support – Talk to trusted friends, family members, or a therapist about decision-making challenges and explore strategies for coping with anxiety in decision-making situations.

By addressing anxiety and developing coping strategies, individuals can regain confidence in their decision-making abilities and navigate life’s choices more effectively. If you need help managing or even diagnosing your anxiety, start by scheduling an appointment with a NOAH primary care provider, counselor, or psychiatrist. Your NOAH Care Team will partner with you to develop the right treatment plan for you.

Counseling and psychiatry services are available for ages 6 and up. Most insurance plans are accepted at NOAH (including all AHCCCS Medicaid plans) and a Sliding Fee Scale offers reduced rates for those that qualify based on household income and family size. For more information about eligibility, contact NOAH Community Resources.

Why Do I Feel Like This? Stress or Anxiety?

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Imagine yourself getting ready for your day. As you get out of bed and jump in the shower, do you find yourself thinking about how busy the week has been and all the things that need to be done around the house? Or are you feeling a deep sense of dread, but you can’t quite figure out why? Your stomach feels nauseous, and you haven’t been able to sleep because your mind never turns off? Both stress and anxiety seem similar because they are part of the same response system in our body when dealing with a perceived threat.  How do you know if how you feel is stress or ongoing anxiety? It can be hard to tell. Here are some things to consider.

Stress is most often related to a specific situation or circumstances in your life and is short term. For example, you are in school and have two exams and a paper due in 3 days. You feel pressured and stay up late to study.  During this time, you experience tightness in your neck and shoulders and find yourself more irritable than normal. Once the tests are done and the paper has been submitted, you feel much better and can now enjoy time with your family and friends.

While anxiety can have very similar symptoms to stress, it is usually more generalized (not focused on one specific event or circumstance) and will linger longer than stress. Many times, a person with anxiety will say they don’t know why they feel worried or can’t sleep. Anxiety shows up in a variety of ways and is different for each person. Irritability, upset stomach, difficulty falling or staying asleep, excessive worry, and feeling like something bad is about to happen are all symptoms of generalized anxiety.

Everyone will experience stress or anxiety at some time in their life. Here are some quick tips to manage your symptoms. First, know that stress and anxiety can often bring with it a range of unpleasant physical symptoms. If you find your heart beating fast or have trouble taking a deep breath, find a way to slow down that works best for you. This could look like:

  • Focus on breathing with intention.
  • Engage in box breathing – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tEmt1Znux58
  • Talk to a trusted friend/family member.
  • Move your body by engaging in some enjoyable physical activity.
  • Briefly place your face in cold water.

It can be hard to decide when to seek help for your symptoms. A good rule of thumb is if your symptoms are impacting your everyday life or are getting in the way of taking care of yourself. Seek the advice of your PCP or a behavioral health practitioner. Most people experience symptoms of stress or anxiety at some time in their life and both respond well to treatment. Just know that how you feel does not have to take over and you can find ways to take control of your thoughts and feelings!

The World Seems Scary – Coping with Anxiety by Andres Jaramillo, LPC

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We all have things that make us feel anxious like giving a presentation or having a job interview but it may seem like in our daily life more and more we encounter extreme, awful, or scary things. It makes it easier for our minds to come up with negative, worst case scenarios that end up turning up the volume on anxiety.

What is anxiety?
It is a normal feeling we experience when we predict that something bad could happen.

Living in today’s constantly connected world, the possibility of something scary, awful, or threatening can pop in our head by just turning on the news or driving our kids to school.

Try these 3 things to turn down anxious feelings so you can continue doing the things you want to do.

1 – Relaxed body is tied to relaxed mind. Even seeing or hearing about awful, scary things – perhaps the news on the latest epidemic – can cause the “fight or flight” response to turn on. Our body makes physical changes like increased heart rate, sweating or tense muscles so it can be prepared to fight or run away from the danger.

When we do activities to purposely deactivate our fight or flight response, or relax our body, our mind plays follows the leader.

Try this, notice: 

  • 5 things you can see – notice shapes, colors, brightness, shadows.
  • 4 things you can hear – notice pitches, volumes, tone.
  • 3 things you can feel/touch – notice textures.
  • 2 things you can smell – notice hints of sweetness, bitterness, pungent, etc.
  • 1 thing you can taste – notice hits of spicy, sweet, sour, etc.

Notice and observe things you have never paid attention to before. Maybe say what you observe out loud, or just to yourself. You can mix it up anyway you like, perhaps you are at a restaurant and you can taste 5 things, or smell 5 things. It is just about using your senses in a purposeful, intentional way. By getting out of your head and engaging your body in a slow, mindful activity it is pretty much impossible to focus on the image that turned anxiety up in the first place.

2 – Remind yourself: What you feel is not always true. I feel like I am going crazy! Perhaps you’ve said something like this to yourself and if we are going to turn down the volume on anxiety, we need to challenge how our feelings “prove” that something is going to happen.
A quick peek at your latest social media feed and you see a story about a family who had a burglar break in their house and murder three people. Quickly shock, fear, horror, or sadness fills your experience. It is valid that you may feel that way but the mind, in its amazing abilities, will use those emotions as proof to make a conclusion that may not be true.
I feel scared so that means something bad is going to happen!

Try this:

  •  Take a few deep breaths – deep enough to see your stomach area expand and contract.
  • Acknowledge you are feeling scared – is it a knot in your stomach? Is it racing thoughts?.
  • Take a few more deep breaths.
  • Focus on the facts.

Facts themselves don’t increase anxiety, the perception that it could be a threat does. By placing time and breathing between what you saw/heard and making any decisions, you allow the intensity of the anxiety to subside like the tide on a beach. You will have a better chance to be calm and focus on the facts not the “coulds.”

3 – Accepting the unpredictable but be prepared. You can’t really know if someone will break in to your house, or use a gun in a violent way, or if you will catch the new virus going around but perhaps we can be prepared the best we know how.

If you have noticed that the news, your social media, or stories you heard from friends have increased your anxiety, you went through 1 and 2 above and you still feel uneasy, then maybe prepared action is the next step.
We have active shooter drills, we get trained in CPR, and we wear our seat belt with the mindset of accepting that we will never know IF something bad could happen and just being prepared anyway.

Have a plan:

  • Create a plan for what you and your family would do if [insert awful situation] happened.
  • Talk with your workplace to double check emergency plans.
  • Have a chat with your children’s school to understand what plans they have.
  • Talk with your doctor about your health concerns.
  • Join a neighborhood watch group.
  • Take a self-defense class.

By moving your focus from “What if’s” to accepting that life is unpredictable and doing your best to be prepared will increase your confidence and readiness just like when we plan and study for what we will say in a presentation or practice for our job interview. If we feel confident and ready, there is no room for anxiety.

Everyone experiences anxiety and yes, it is normal. If we have certain tools, like the three above, we can get through any situation that raises our anxiety and be ok even in today’s hectic, scary world.

An important note: Daily, normal anxiety is different than having an anxiety disorder.

If the anxiety you feel is unmanageable, has been going on for more than two weeks, and it is interfering with your daily life or relationships than perhaps you can think about visiting with a mental health professional and figuring out a best course of action.

Six Anxiety and Panic Coping Skills

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For many, coping with change is hard enough, let alone the emotions many may face such as fear and anxiety due to changes in daily routines. Added stress from job loss and inability to cover expenses, illness, or loss of a loved, may cause anxiety and panic. Learn these six tips to help you cope with these emotions.

Breathing slowly and deeply. Anxiety can cause you to breathe very quickly, which makes both the mental and physical symptoms of a panic attack or generalized anxiety even worse. When you start to feel panicky, be sure to take slow, deep breaths to soothe your mind and body. Be sure to breathe using “belly breathing” also known as diaphragmatic breathing.

Stop and think. When your thoughts start spinning out of control, tell yourself to stop. Organize your thoughts and decide what you need to do to get yourself calm again. This is a way to interrupt thoughts and refocus.

Think positively. Push negative thoughts out of your mind, and remind yourself that you are in control. Think about times when you’ve been able to manage situations successfully and reduce anxiety. Stay in the present moment.

Take a break. If you need to leave a situation, do so or tell someone you need to leave. Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Allowing yourself to become more upset will not help if what you really need is to take a walk and blow off some steam. Allow yourself to have space as needed.

Relax your muscles. Anxiety causes your entire body to tense up, so make a conscious effort to relax each muscle from your toes all the way up to your neck and face. This will alleviate tension.

Get physical. Exercise can combat stress and anxiety. It can also improve your overall health and immune system. Even a brisk walk can help.

Tips to remember:

  • Deep breaths.
  • Self-care.
  • Adequate sleep.
  • Exercise.
  • Talk to yourself.
  • Acknowledge your feeling.
  • Mindfulness.
  • Lavender hot baths.
  • Cut back on caffeine/nicotine/alcohol.
  • Stay present.
  • Good nutrition.
  • Muscle relaxation.
  • Slow down.
  • Picture your ‘safe place.’
  • HALT (hungry, angry, lonely, tired).
  • Close your eyes

Recognizing Anxiety – Video

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Our friends at Mental Health America note “While we can’t completely shield young people from all the #traumatic situations they may face, we can help them learn to manage their #emotions and reactions in ways that cultivate #resilience.” Our Care Team at NOAH offers behavioral health #consulting and traditional outpatient #counseling. Our Psychiatric Nurse Practitioners work alongside #medical and #behavioralhealth to assess, diagnose and effectively treat the core-symptoms of our patients.

Tag Archive for: anxiety