Anxiety Basics
An emotion that all humans experience that helps humans detect and respond to possible threats in their environment
What is anxiety?
A treatment for anxiety problems that involves approaching your fears and practicing tolerating the anxiety
What is exposure therapy?
Examples include "everybody is good at their own things," "there will always be people who you look up to and people who look up to you," and "no one will even notice if I don't do it perfectly"
What are coping thoughts?
A visual tool that we use to measure how distressed/anxious we feel, often used when doing exposures, ranges from 0-100
What is a distress thermometer?
An exposure therapy practice where we try to picture or relive the stressful situation in our minds and practice tolerating anxiety
What is an imaginal (or imaginary) exposure?
Can be helpful for calming your body down when anxious
What is deep breathing?
The way the body responds when someone detects a possible threat in their environment, helps them prepare to respond to threat
What is the fight, flight, or freeze response?
A list of exposures to be completed ranging from easy to hard
What is an exposure hierarchy/ladder?
Examples include drawing, working on a Rubik's cube, watching a funny video, or playing with my dog
What is distraction?
Examples include all or nothing thinking, disqualifying the positive, jumping to conclusions, and catastrophizing
What are negative thinking traps (or unhelpful thinking styles)?
Two things that can influence our feelings about a situation. Both tend to be easier to change than changing our emotions, so we often try to change them in therapy to change uncomfortable emotions.
What are thoughts and behaviors?
Things I can do involving smells, sounds, etc. to help me cope with uncomfortable emotions
What are sensory soothing coping skills?