Please enable JavaScript.
Coggle requires JavaScript to display documents.
NICABM Anxiety M10 Practical ways to diminish the inner experience of…
NICABM Anxiety M10
Practical ways to diminish the inner experience of anxiety
The issue
Putting too much focus on the anxiety itself.
Black-and-white way of thinking that actually sustains anxiety’s power.
The approach:
Elicit a specific change in mindset:
shift their focus from thinking that they’re going to find the magic trick that gets rid of the inner experience of anxiety so that their lives can move on, to having a new hope: what is the anxiety getting in the way of?
Could be attending a meaningful event, seeing important people...
This helps the patient find the one thing hidden under their anxiety that can lessen its impact
Then, get them to focus their attention and energy on being able to do whatever anxiety is getting in the way of.
Having an incremental or growth mindset toward anxiety is important for patients to being able to actually make this leap. They have to believe that something about thieir experience of anxiety can change.
An incremental mindset is the opposite of a fixed mindset, which says, the way that I feel now is how I ll always feel. It will never change. It ll never go away. I m stuck in this anxiety cycle.
What do you believe can change?
Shift people’s focus away from, 'I want to get rid of the anxiety' to, "I’m confident that I can have a different relationship with this, and as that relationship changes, there’s a very good chance that the inner experience will change as well."
Refocusing their relationship to anxiety while expanding their capacity to experience it. Cf M4 ACT
Anxiety is often a response to something that is meaningful – not necessarily something that is threatening
Start to reframe – okay, well, anxiety is often linked to things that are part of a meaningful life, things that you care about, people you care about. So, that’s part of this context.
What might you say to yourself that would encourage you to go after what s meaningful if you wanted to? If you decided you wanted to choose meaning over trying to avoid the discomfort of feeling anxious?
List those things, say them out loud
Help the patient to see the common humanity in their challenges. Feeling anxious does not mean they are broken, it means they are human.
Research showing that
acceptance transforms the inner experience.
Reinterpreting anxiety as your body and brain
trying to help you. Jeremy Jamieson
Accepting anxiety rather than feeling like they have to suppress it or avoid it => they are both better able to function and they do better with whatever they’re afraid of, and they also have a healthier physiological stress response.
OCD
People who decided to accept and allow that inner experience to be present without suppressing or without distracting and without arguing with it, they were both less disturbed by it when it happened and they experienced fewer intrusions later on as well.
:warning: Pretending to accept does not work. Requires a deep commitment to actually accepting. Clinging desperately to the belief that acceptance will make anxiety go away won't work.
Somatic symptoms of anxiety
Musculoskeletal pain disorders and back-pain
The avoidance of activity is absolutely central to maintaining the disorder
Key questions
:
What have you given up because you’ve been afraid to use your body normally?
What is the meaning of that, that you’ve given up?
What would you prefer at this moment – to have no pain but live a constricted life, or have pain but live a full life?
Answering those questions elicit a motivation to be willing to do the thing that doesn’t come naturally, which is facing the fear
:warning: Sneaky bargain, “Okay, I’ll start moving because then I’ll make the back pain go away – right?”
The mind tries to turn supposed
acceptance into a tool for non non-acceptance.
When patients are ambivalent about being less anxious
They’re worried that if they become less anxious, they’ll become less vigilant and also less motivated to deal with threats, and then that’swhen a bad thing will happen.
Help them gradually appreciate that they can recognize threats and take care of them without feeling anxious about it.
In fact, anxiety often wears down threat response and reduces vigilance because it draws people into an absorption of their own anxiety.
They don’t need to keep getting identified with it and preoccupied with it, which doesn’t really serve them or other people.