Getting Ready – Preparing
STRESS is what I feel when my brain is on Alert!
A stressor is a thought, feeling, act, or sensation that produces the feeling of anxiety.
Preparation
What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is created in your brain and body based on the meaning you interpret from your stressors. Meaning is created from your past personal experiences and how you coped with them in the past. Throughout life you learn about stress scenarios which are like little movies in your head and your brain records for future use. Your brain plays that movie when you get triggered by the same type of stress.
This creates your stress reaction of anxiety which is usually pretty close to what you did the last time you were stressed. Stress is a trigger for a response, so you act quickly to make it stop, go away, happen again, or whatever seems to work in that situation.
All situations are not the same so all reactions to stress would not be the same. We have learned it’s not just the dramatic stressful events in our life that seem overwhelming. When you consider the many events in our daily life that triggers our thoughts and feelings – the sum of these cause overload if not managed and produce the feelings of being stressed out. Your brain is the key of your stress responses because it determines what is threatening and controls your behavioral responses.
Let’s get to know the different kind of stress situations your brain encounters.
What is Social Anxiety?
During childhood, we learn who we are supposed to be and how we are supposed to act. When you spend the day at school in class this means you are a student. But you are not alone. You are surrounded by people, some of them are your friends. Some you don’t know at all, some you don’t like, some don’t like you.
From your first day of school you watch and learn what is expected of you. You get the idea that a certain response fits or makes sense with your learning to being a student.
A Typical Situation
- What do other people do, think, and say…
- What do they think about me?
- What do I do, think, and say about them?
- What do I think and say about me?
A Normal Anxiety Response
- I do what I think other people will think is cool, smart, tough and hopefully this fits with who I am in the other areas of my life as well as who I want to be with my friends.
What is Event-related anxiety?
An event-related anxiety may have occurred at some time in your life. Maybe you fell out of a boat and hit your head so now you feel anxious around boats and water.
These events are situations that you don’t have control over and they happen to you, so your brain creates a message to be anxious when it senses that something like it could happen again.
We learn meaning from everyday experiences and from special events. During a Fire Drill you get up and go outside of the building. The usual meaning – another stupid fire drill – yeah, we get a break from class!
But if one day you smell smoke – WOW, maybe it’s not a drill – now your brain is more alert than usual. There is a fire in the room – Joe set his shirt on fire while playing with a lighter…where is the fire extinguisher? This is a special event. From now on everyone will watch when Joe is around.
What is Anticipation anxiety?
The test is on Friday. The test will be more difficult because you don’t’t like math, you think the teacher is boring, and you didn’t study much. Now you feel uneasy and worried about the bad grade you will probably get.
You have choices. You could study more or live with the feeling of anxiety because you anticipate a bad grade.
What is Chronic Anxiety?
Some type of anxiety accumulates over a long time. Let’s say that a friend dumped you when you joined the volleyball team instead of staying with the soccer team. You see this person everyday at lunch and they stare at you and talk to the people at their table about what a jerk you are.
Every day you feel frustrated and lonely when it’s time for lunch. Eventually you find yourself avoiding the lunchroom and eating in the hallway by your locker.
Another situation may be your parents are stressed with finances and seems like they argue almost every day. You don’t want to hear it, so you feel angry at them and after a couple of months you are angry when you think of money and feel bad about asking them for anything.
Your anxiety has grown over time so you try to avoid the cause of it. But you find yourself feeling bad when you deal with something that reminds you of it.
Social Anxiety
Event Anxiety
Anticipation Anxiety
Chronic Anxiety
These are the way that your adaptive response to anxiety gets created. We will work through the anxiety from each kind of stress that has made an mpression in your brain.
In this process we will learn about what your brain does with these types of anxiety experiences and how to change it. Don’t worry there is no test on types of anxiety coming up!
Time to go to work:
To get started on your anxiety let’s talk about the Stress Scale. This list will show you how feelings of anxiety escalate from mild coping behavior around small triggers to a level of active management on up into the highest levels when things get out of control.
The goal here is to become aware of anxiety at all levels and to learn your individual stress responses. The stress scale begins at level 1 and goes to 10. As anxiety builds, your mind and your central nervous system work to tolerate it or to lower its effect physically and mentally.
At different levels, coping will be for different purposes. At low levels the process isn’t painful, but uncomfortable, as you try to cope with stress.
Levels 1, 2, 3 are tolerable and help you adjust to the cues in the environment.
But at level 5 your awareness of having to cope in order to feel “in control” is very high. And when it gets to level 6 you have lost your ability to cope and have begun to struggle with reactions in ways that don’t feel right.
Many emotions and behaviors come into play along the scale such as anger, sadness, depression or aggression. The adaptive behavioral approach to lower anxiety works when you feel anxiety instead of avoiding it, when you understand the reason you react a specific way. You need to feel anxious to work with it.
As you are working with the stress scale and other exercises use breathing and movement to help keep emotions at a comfortable, working level.
To help you with this part the form below has a list from 10-1 to list your stressors.
The top of the scale are behaviors can become destructive to self or others. The middle level is the experience of continuing to manage or try to control your emotions.
You can’t be wrong on this scale — it isn’t a test — so go ahead and give it a try and even make some notes in the scale to help you remember something for later.
- On your list starting at 10 – What was the worst anxiety, you felt this week?
- What was the happiest, relaxed, feeling you had this past week? Label that a 1.
- Find a time when you felt really stressed but handled it pretty well? Label this a 5.