Anxiety recovery starts by understanding what our triggers are.  Because anxiety disorders are a behavior conditioning, it is possible for us to learn when we will have higher levels of anxiety.

For instance, a bridge phobic will naturally have higher levels of anxiety when driving over a bridge.  This becomes a little more difficult for people who suffer from generalized anxiety, but there are still specific triggers that we need to identify and be proactive engaging to learn to manage our anxiety and create anxiety recovery.

Let’s take another look at the bridge phobic.  It is easy to understand high anxiety on the bridge, but there will also be higher levels driving to the bridge.  Just knowing that bridge travel is required in the future, there will be thoughts and levels of anxiety throughout the entire day – or even days in advance – leading up to the bridge travel.

For the bridge phobic, this can result in a lot of confusion.  In many cases, the bridge phobic may not even know why they are experiencing higher levels of anxiety.  This is how a specific phobia can manifest itself as more of a generalized anxiety situation.

People with actual generalized anxiety experience similar situations where a specific trigger increases the anxiety and leads into other areas, sometimes blurring the actual trigger.

The first step in anxiety recovery is trying to identify our triggers.  What causes our anxiety to rise?  Even in people who have generalized anxiety, there are specific triggers that will cause the anxiety to increase.  As well as there are situations where the anxiety will settle down and not be so pronounced.

Once we know a situation or two that causes our anxiety to rise, then we can start to Expect our higher levels of anxiety.  And through this Expecting, a couple of things start to happen; first, we start to demystify anxiety.  Once we start to learn the patterns and when to expect higher levels of anxiety, it doesn’t seem so scary.  Yes, it will still hurt the same, but taking away the surprise of when it will happen will give us an opportunity to prepare for these times of higher anxiety.

This preparing for anxiety for the second thing that starts to happen when we can Expect when our anxiety will increase.  We will discuss in future posts exactly how to prepare and approach the anxious situations.

Another thing that happens to us when we Expect is that we automatically start to “allow & accept”.  Our natural approach to anxiety is to stop it.  We don’t like it, we don’t want it and so we try to stop it from coming.  Unfortunately, we cannot stop it, and therefore our failed attempts to push it away only causes us to feel powerless and we suffer more.

When we Expect our attitude is more accepting.  This allows us to approach anxiety in a different way; a more productive way.  And create anxiety recovery!

To create anxiety recovery, we have to change our approach.  Learning to Expect is the first opportunity we have to change our approach.