Managing my anxiety! Expert help at The Horsforth Centre
What is anxiety? One of the world experts on anxiety (Christine Padesky) describes the anxiety equation:
Over-estimating the danger
Anxiety = ———————————————-
Under-estimating my ability to cope
This is a really interesting idea! Let’s look at an example. Imagine I am really struggling at work; and I don’t want to go in tomorrow. As I think of moving towards work it gives me a sick feeling in my stomach, I notice weird sensations in my legs and my arms seem to feel “sparkly”. This could well be symptoms of anxiety.
What am I saying to myself? It is likely that I am thinking about work as “really big and dangerous” – say giving it a score of 10 out of 10 at the moment for being dangerous.
Meanwhile I might be unconsciously saying to myself “I can’t cope with work, it’s going to be terrible, I can’t do it anymore”. Perhaps if I gave this a score it would be 1 out of 10 for my ability to cope.
If we remember our GCSE maths and dividing fractions then a score of 10 over a score of 1 equals 10. So in the situation above I can think about having a high anxiety score of 10.
If we now turn to an easier situation – say baking a set of cupcakes. I might see this as a very safe activity; say a danger score of 1; and my ability to bake cakes is high, I’m good at it, so 10 for my ability to cope with baking cakes.
The sum for this then would be 1 over 10 which equals a tenth or 0.1; a very low anxiety score.
Practitioners here at The Horsforth Centre work with anxiety every day and have lots of ways of helping you to rationalise, manage and normalise anxiety. It would be great to work with you.