Appreciating Anxiety

Now I bet you are wondering what's to appreciate about anxiety. However, you experience it anxiety it is not something we tend to be grateful for and embrace as helpful to us!

But the importance of accepting our feelings is a common theme across a number of psychological therapies including:

· Acceptance and commitment therapy – instead of struggling with feelings, people re taught to turn off their “struggle switch” and learn to accept their feelings and how to live with the without letting them get in their way of committed actions.

· Team CBT – initial step of positive reframing involves getting clients to explore the benefits of their feelings and what they demonstrate about who they are and their core values.

· Dialectical Behavioural Therapy – teaches people to accept their feelings as they are, while also learning to modify how they respond to them and build skills in regulating them

Accepting and appreciating our anxiety is important because when we don’t do this we can prolong our anxiety and even end up making ourselves feel even worse.

We can make our anxiety worse in the long-term by engaging in behaviours that immediately reduce anxiety such as:

· Avoidance

· Procrastination

· Reassurance seeking and checking

· OCD compulsions

· Safety behaviours

Primary vs. secondary emotions – secondary emotions

We can make ourselves feel guilty, embarrassed or ashamed about our anxiety when we believe or think that we “should not be feeling this way”.