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Old 01-29-2013, 03:05 PM
xanadu00 xanadu00 is offline
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Minnesota
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xanadu00 xanadu00 is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Minnesota
Posts: 239
10 yr Member
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It depends on the specific nature of your anxiety. Different forms of treatment work well for different conditions. The first step is to get a clear understanding of the specific type of anxiety you are dealing with. Is it panic? Phobias? Generalized anxiety? OCD? These all require slightly different approaches.

This page will give you good basic descriptions of the various types of anxiety disorders:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topic...rs/index.shtml

This book is a good place to start for getting a general overview of anxiety:

http://www.amazon.com/Dancing-Fear-C...cing+with+fear

One rule of thumb for any type of anxiety is to go toward what you fear rather than avoiding it. The more you avoid a feared situation, the more you will feed your anxiety. By contrast, by facing your fears, you habituate to them, just as wild animals habituate to humans when they're always around them (like in the national parks). This strategy works best for phobias, panic disorder, and some types of OCD. The form of treatment that uses this approach is called Exposure-Response Prevention (ERP).

Meditation and deep breathing are good practices to develop, though I think it is unlikely that you can fully manage anxiety with meditation--unless you're very good at it.

Most forms of anxiety treatment also use some element of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), which consists of identifying "thinking errors" that feed into your anxiety (such as overestimation of risk, black-and-white thinking, hyperresponsibility, etc.). Therapists will often combine CBT and ERP in treating anxiety.
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Male, 39 years old, suffering from PCS as a result of being rear-ended on 1/23/11. Part-time philosophy professor.
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