Think about what it means to be human. Yes, we have internalised toxic levels of pressure to be a certain way. We also know, as we mature, that being a certain way it complete bull shit and nonsense. I saw a quote once that said “Can you remember who you were, before the world told you who you should be?” -Charles Bukowski. I don’t know who this person is, but it’s the truth. Come home to yourself, and reach out for help from a professional if you need some support or help with that.
Managing moderate to intense anxiety often involves a combination of techniques that address both the mind and body. Here are some effective strategies:
1. Breathing Exercises: Practice slow, deep breathing to calm your nervous system. For example, inhale for a count of four, hold for four, and exhale for four.
2. Progressive Muscle Relaxation: Tense and then relax each muscle group in your body, starting from your toes and working upward.
3. Grounding Techniques: Use the 5-4-3-2-1 method to focus on your senses—identify 5 things you see, 4 you feel, 3 you hear, 2 you smell, and 1 you taste.
4. Mindfulness and Meditation: Engage in mindfulness practices to stay present and reduce anxious thoughts. Apps like Headspace or Calm can be helpful.
5. Physical Activity: Exercise, even a short walk, can release endorphins and reduce anxiety levels.
6. Cognitive Behavioural Techniques: Challenge negative thoughts by questioning their validity and replacing them with more balanced perspectives.
7. Healthy Lifestyle Choices: Maintain a consistent sleep schedule, eat nutritious meals, and limit caffeine and alcohol intake.
8. Journaling: Write down your thoughts and feelings to process them and identify triggers.
9. Social Support: Talk to trusted friends, family, or support groups to share your experiences and gain perspective.
10. Professional Help: If anxiety persists, consider seeking therapy or counselling. Techniques like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT) or medication prescribed by a professional can be highly effective.
When traditional strategies don’t seem effective for managing intense, chronic anxiety, there are additional approaches you can explore:
a. Therapeutic Modalities:
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): Focuses on accepting anxious thoughts rather than fighting them, while committing to actions aligned with your values.
Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT): Combines mindfulness with skills for emotional regulation and distress tolerance.
Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR): Often used for trauma-related anxiety, it helps reprocess distressing memories.
b. Medication:
Anti-anxiety medications or antidepressants may be prescribed by a psychiatrist. These can help manage symptoms when therapy alone isn’t sufficient.
c. Lifestyle Adjustments:
Explore dietary changes, such as reducing sugar and processed foods, which can impact mood and anxiety levels.
Incorporate consistent physical activity tailored to your preferences.
d. Support Groups:
Joining a group for individuals with anxiety can provide a sense of community and shared understanding.
e. Intensive Programs:
Consider enrolling in an intensive outpatient program (IOP) or residential treatment program for anxiety, which offers structured and comprehensive care.
f. Emerging Treatments:
Research into treatments like ketamine therapy or transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) shows promise for treatment-resistant anxiety.
g. Alternative Therapies:
Practices like acupuncture, yoga, or tai chi can promote relaxation and reduce anxiety.
Biofeedback and neurofeedback can help you gain control over physiological responses to stress. They are techniques that help individuals gain control over certain physiological and mental processes. Here’s a breakdown:
i. Biofeedback is a mind-body therapy that uses sensors to monitor physiological functions like heart rate, muscle tension, breathing, or skin temperature. The goal is to provide real-time feedback to help individuals learn how to regulate these functions consciously. For example:
Heart Rate Variability Biofeedback: Helps manage stress by teaching control over heart rate.
Muscle Tension Biofeedback: Useful for conditions like chronic pain or tension headaches.
By practicing biofeedback, people can develop skills to manage stress, anxiety, and other health conditions2.
ii. Neurofeedback, a specialised form of biofeedback, focuses on brain activity. It uses electroencephalography (EEG) to monitor brainwaves and provides feedback to help individuals regulate their brain function. For instance:
It can help with conditions like ADHD, anxiety, depression, and PTSD.
During a session, individuals might watch visual cues or listen to sounds that reflect their brainwave activity, learning to adjust their mental state for better focus or relaxation4.
Both techniques are non-invasive and can be effective tools for improving mental and physical well-being.
IMPORTANT NOTE: It’s necessary to consult with a mental health professional or medical doctor to tailor these options to your specific needs.
Unhelpful Cognitions
Mental Filter: This thinking style involves a “filtering in” and “filtering out” process – a sort of “tunnel vision”, focusing on only one part of a situation and ignoring the rest. Usually this means looking at the negative parts of a situation and forgetting the positive parts, and the whole picture is coloured by what may be a single negative detail.
Jumping to Conclusions: We jump to conclusions when we assume that we know what someone else is thinking (mind reading) and when we make predictions about what is going to happen in the future (predictive thinking).
Mind reading: Is a habitual thinking pattern characterized by expecting others to know what you’re thinking without having to tell them or expecting to know what others are thinking without them telling you. This is very common, and most people can identify. Oftentimes, when we are telling someone a story about an interaction, we’ve had with someone else, we will make mind reading assumptions without actually having fact or evidence e.g., “They haven’t phoned me in two weeks so they must be angry with me for cancelling on them last week.”
Personalisation: This involves blaming yourself for everything that goes wrong or could go wrong, even when you may only be partly responsible or not responsible at all. You might be taking 100% responsibility for the occurrence of external events. It can also involve blaming someone else for something for which they have no responsibility. This can often occur when setting a boundary with someone and you take responsibility for their guilt or anger.
Catastrophising: Catastrophising occurs when we “blow things out of proportion” and we view the situation as terrible, awful, dreadful, and horrible, even though the reality is that the problem itself may be quite small.
Black & White Thinking: Also known as splitting, dichotomous thinking, and all-or-nothing thinking, involves seeing only one side or the other (the positives or the negatives, for example). You are either wrong or right, good or bad and so on. There are no in-betweens or shades of grey.
Should-ing and Must-ing: Sometimes by saying “I should…” or “I must…” you can put unreasonable demands or pressure on yourself and others. Although these statements are not always unhelpful (e.g., “I should not get drunk and drive home”), they can sometimes create unrealistic expectations.
Should-ing and must-ing can be a psychological distortion because it can “deny reality” e.g., I shouldn’t have had so much to drink last night. This is helpful in the sense that it communicates to us that we have exceeded our boundaries, however, saying “shouldn’t” about a past situation can be futile because it cannot be changed.
Overgeneralisation: When we overgeneralise, we take one instance in the past or present, and impose it on all current or future situations. If we say, “You always…” or “Everyone…”, or “I never…” then we are probably overgeneralising.
Labelling: We label ourselves and others when we make global statements based on behaviour in specific situations. We might use this label even though there are many more examples that are not consistent with that label. Labelling is a cognitive distortion whereby we take one characteristic of a person/group/situation and apply it to the whole person/group/situation. Example: “Because I failed a test, I am a failure” or “Because she is frequently late to work, she is irresponsible”.
Emotional Reasoning: This thinking style involves basing your view of situations or yourself on the way you are feeling. For example, the only evidence that something bad is going to happen is that you feel like something bad is going to happen. Emotions and feelings are real however they are not necessarily indicative of objective truth or fact.
Magnification and Minimisation: In this thinking style, you magnify the positive attributes of other people and minimise your own positive attributes. Also known as the binocular effect on thinking. Often it means that you enlarge (magnify) the positive attributes of other people and shrink (minimise) your own attributes, just like looking at the world through either end of the same pair of binoculars.
(CCI, 2008)
To answer that question, I’ll need to explain a part of the brain called the Limbic System.
Within the brain there is a set of structures called the limbic system. There are several important structures within the limbic system: the amygdala, hippocampus, thalamus, hypothalamus, basal ganglia, and cingulate gyrus. The limbic system is among the oldest parts of the brain in evolutionary terms. It’s not just found in humans and other mammals, but also fish, amphibians, and reptiles.
The limbic system is the part of the brain involved in our behavioural and emotional responses, especially when it comes to behaviours we need for survival: feeding, reproduction and caring for our young, and fight or flight responses (https://qbi.uq.edu.au/brain/brain-anatomy/limbic-system).
The limbic system contains the brain’s reward circuit or pathway. The reward circuit links together several brain structures that control and regulate our ability to feel pleasure (or “reward”). The sensation of pleasure or reward motivates us to repeat behaviours. When the reward circuit is activated, each individual neuron (nerve cell) in the circuit relays electrical and chemical signals.
In a healthy world without addictive manufactured drugs, humans survive and thrive when they are rewarded for certain behaviours (cleaning, hard work, sex, eating, achieving goals etc), hence evolution has provided us with this feel-good chemical so that we will repeat pleasurable behaviours.
There is a gap between neurons called the synapse. Neurons communicate with each other by sending an electro-chemical signal from one neuron (pre-synaptic neuron) to the next (post-synaptic neuron). In the reward circuit, neurons release several neurotransmitters (chemical messengers). One of these is called dopamine. Released dopamine molecules travel across the synapse and link up with proteins called dopamine receptors on the surface of the post-synaptic neuron (the receiving nerve cell). When the dopamine binds to the dopamine receptor, it causes proteins attached to the interior part of the post-synaptic neuron to carry the signal onward within the cell. Some dopamine will re-enter the pre-synaptic nerve cell via dopamine transporters, and it can be re-released.
When a reward is encountered, the pre-synaptic nerve cell (neuron) releases a large amount of dopamine in a rapid burst. Dopamine transporters will remove “excessive” amounts of dopamine naturally within the limbic system. Dopamine surges like this help the brain to learn and adapt to a complex social and physical world.
Drugs like methamphetamine (a stimulant drug) are able to “hijack” this process contributing to behaviours which can be considered unnatural or potentially dysfunctional. A range of consequences can follow.
When someone uses methamphetamine, the drug quickly enters the brain, depending on how the drug is administered. Nevertheless, meth or ice is quick acting. Meth blocks the re-entry of dopamine back into the pre-synaptic neuron – which is not what happens naturally. This is also what cocaine does to the brain. However, unlike cocaine, higher doses of meth increase the release of dopamine from the presynaptic neuron leading to a significantly greater amount of dopamine within the synapse. Higher doses of cocaine will not release “more dopamine” from the pre-synaptic neuron like meth does. This is why after about 30 minutes or so, people who use cocaine will need more to maintain the high.
Dopamine gets trapped in the synapse (space between nerve cells) because the meth (like cocaine) prevents “transporters” from removing it back into the cell it came from. The postsynaptic cell is activated to dangerously high levels as it absorbs so much dopamine over a long period of time. The person using meth experiences powerful feelings of euphoria, increased energy, wakefulness, physical activity, and a decreased appetite.
When an unnatural amount of dopamine floods the limbic system like this over a long period of time, without reabsorption, then our brain is not replenished with dopamine, hence people who use meth often (even on a single occasion) may feel unmotivated, depressed, joyless, and/or pointlessness when they stop using. Figuratively speaking, the brain is “empty” or low on dopamine fuel, and it will take time to for dopamine to return to baseline levels and replenish itself. This may motivate the user to seek more methamphetamine to return to “normal”.
Methamphetamine can also cause a variety of cardiovascular problems, including rapid heart rate, irregular heartbeat, and increased blood pressure. Hyperthermia (elevated body temperature) and convulsions may occur with methamphetamine overdose, and if not treated immediately, can result in death (What are the immediate (short-term) effects of methamphetamine misuse? | National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) (nih.gov))
SIGNS OF SUBSTANCE MISUSE OR ADDICTION
(Substance abuse, misuse and addiction | Lifeline Australia | 13 11 14)
