Cognitive-behavioral therapy is the most widely researched therapy intervention, and for most of the most common mental health conditions it is the absolute best therapy approach.  You might not know much about CBT, though, so today I’ll tell you 3 of the main lessons that underlie how CBT works. If you’re not in therapy, these lessons might help you know where to focus your energy in overcoming your own mental health struggles; and if you are in therapy (even CBT), these lessons should help you consolidate what you’re learning.  Let’s get into it.

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7 Key Differences Between Everyday Anxiety & an Anxiety Disorder Anxiety is a normal part of everyday life.  Fear and anxiety and even panic have evolved as useful survival tools.  If there’s a threat to our survival, it behooves us to be able to activate our fight or flight system and GTFO.  Know what I mean? But fear and anxiety and panic that bleed into our everyday lives can sometimes push beyond what’s normal and become a disorder.  How do you know whether what you’re experiencing is anxiety or an anxiety disorder? I’ve got 7 key differences for you. 1. What triggers the anxiety Everyday anxiety is often triggered by stress.  Things like an upcoming move, a job change, financial pressure, relationship difficulties, etc. can trigger anxiety.  The anxiety will typically go away once those problems are resolved. But in an anxiety disorder, the anxiety, fear, or panic can come out of nowhere.  It doesn’t necessarily need a specific trigger to pop up.   2. When the anxiety occurs Everyday anxiety often occurs in situations when there is an actual threat or danger.  So if you’re walking at night and someone runs up to you really quickly from behind, your brain will flag this as an actual threat to your safety, so your anxiety (actually, fear) response will be activated.  But in anxiety disorders, anxiety can occur even if there isn’t actually anything threatening or dangerous happening. Not only can anxiety come out of absolutely nowhere (see difference #1), but it can also occur when your brain wrongly flags something as threatening or dangerous when it’s not actually.  So, when things like a relatively minor mistake, a blemish on your face, or a change in plans generate anxiety, that’s a sign that your brain is interpreting these small mistakes or perceived flaws as literally dangerous to your reputation, relationships, finances, health, etc.   3. How long the anxiety lasts Everyday anxiety typically lasts as long as the stressor, threat, or danger lasts.  As soon as you’ve resolved the stress or gotten out of danger, the anxiety will dissipate pretty quickly.  But anxiety disorders are much more persistent. The anxiety can be constant, lasting days, weeks, months, or even years at a time .   4. How extreme or excessive the anxiety is When everyday anxiety is triggered, it’s usually based on a fairly accurate estimation of how dangerous or threatening a situation really is.  That means we’ll get more anxious about bigger things and less anxious about smaller things. Anxiety disorders don’t tend to care how big the danger actually is.  In anxiety disorders, our brains get in the habit of overestimating how risky or dangerous something is, which means the anxiety becomes excessive or out of proportion to the actual situation.  So things like a typo in an email feel just as dangerous as someone breaking into your house...even if you know they’re not the same thing, your brain can’t tell the difference and you have a very similar emotional response.   5. How much the anxiety interferes with your everyday activities Everyday anxiety doesn’t usually interfere with your daily activities or your ability to get ordinary things done.  Even if you’re stressed about a project at work, you still want to do all the things you’d normally do -- your chores, hobbies, sleep and appetite, social engagements, etc.  But anxiety is much more disruptive in anxiety disorders. At that level, the anxiety is disrupting your ability to engage in normal activities. You don’t sleep as well, you stress eat or don’t eat enough, and you have to really work yourself up to do all the things you’d do if you weren’t anxious.  Be careful here, though: People with the perfectionistic form of anxiety often keep doing all the things they’d normally do even though they have pretty significant anxiety (even an anxiety disorder).  But they do the activities in a special way to accommodate the anxiety or they just push through and end up not enjoying their lives....which brings me to  ......... 6. How much the anxiety interferes with how much you enjoy life Everyday anxiety doesn’t disrupt how enjoyable your life is.  It’s noticeable during the isolated times it shows up, but your health, comfort, and happiness aren’t compromised by it.  But in anxiety disorders, the anxiety is severe and persistent enough that your health suffers (GI problems, headaches, etc.), you feel uncomfortable all day long, and you don’t feel happy.  With an anxiety disorder, life feels much more difficult than it should.   7. How controllable the anxiety is Finally, everyday anxiety is perceived as manageable.  It’s mild enough and transient enough that you believe you can stay ahead of it.  But anxiety disorders feel uncontrollable. It’s intense and constant enough that you worry about going crazy, losing your cool, or being unable to keep it together.   A Chart Showing the Difference Between Anxiety and Anxiety Disorders If you’re a visual person, grab this chart where I put it in a table so you can see side-by-side what the difference is between everyday anxiety and anxiety disorders.  Just like the difference between anxiety, fear, and panic, the line between everyday anxiety and anxiety disorders is ultimately arbitrary.  There’s no one thing that defines whether a person has ordinary anxiety or is dealing with an anxiety disorder.  Instead, it’s a combination of these 7 essential differences and a gut-check on how severe, persistent, and intrusive the anxiety is in a person’s life.   DOWNLOAD A CHART SHOWING THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ANXIETY AND ANXIETY DISORDERS Ever wondered why you have an anxiety disorder while someone else just has everyday anxiety?  Next week, we’re keeping this conversation about anxiety alive as we talk about the three main things that cause anxiety disorders. If you’ve ever wondered where anxiety comes from or why you have anxiety, I’ll tell you all about it next week. Don’t miss it. Talk to you soon,Dr. Finch P.S.    Remember, this is education, not treatment.  Always consult with a psychologist or therapist about your mental health to determine what information and interventions are best for you.  See the disclaimer for more details.   Hayden C. Finch, PhD, is a practicing psychologist in Des Moines, Iowa, dedicated to helping you master your mental health.

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The 4-Part Spiral That Creates Panic Recently, we’ve been chatting a lot about anxiety.  I brought you 9 of my personal favorite ways to manage anxiety without medication and told you about 6 things that trigger anxiety.  Today, we’re chatting about the 4-part spiral that creates panic.  Panic attacks are super scary and bothersome, but knowing what creates them can help us stop the spiral and learn to master our panic.  The spiral is kickstarted with a trigger.  True panic attacks often seem to occur out of the blue, but they’re frequently actually triggered by some sort of unusual physical sensation.  Once the attack has been triggered, a four-part spiral creates panic.   PART 1 OF THE PANIC SPIRAL: BIOLOGICAL First up: biological things happen.  This includes the obvious physical symptoms of panic, like racing or pounding heart, sweating, clammy hands, numbness and tingling, etc.  But it also includes things like differences in the way your brain is built or the way it works...some of those differences are things you inherit, while others have just developed over your lifetime.  Speaking of heritability, inheriting an anxious temperament or anxiety-related personality traits can contribute to panic.  There are also all sorts of brain systems that might be related to panic, ranging from neurotransmitter systems to hormone systems.  Plus, once a person has had a panic attack, the body seems to compensate by lowering the biological threshold for triggering another panic attack.  Then, it can actually trigger panic attacks without any sort of outside trigger...that’s where panic attacks start to happen out of the blue.   PART 2 OF THE PANIC SPIRAL: BEHAVIORAL At the same time that all kinds of biological things are happening in a panic attack, there are behavioral things happening.  One is that our brains take an inventory of everything that was happening around us at the time of the first panic attack and flagging all of those little things as things that could potentially produce the same reaction in the future...I was wearing a yellow shirt when it happened, I just ate a taco, and I was at my grandma’s house, etc.  Your brain won’t know which of those things actually triggered the panic attack, so it’ll guess or just assume all of them might have been involved. Then, in the future, your brain is extra cautious in similar situations and can be more susceptible to a panic attack.  Also, once you’ve had a panic attack, you never want to have another one.  So you might start avoiding situations involving yellow shirts, tacos, and your grandma’s house.  Unfortunately, if you do that, your brain never learns that your grandma’s house doesn’t actually have anything to do with panic, so you just remain afraid of her house.  Plus, we might escape new or similar situations if we start to feel “off.” So I avoid going to grandma’s house because something about it just makes me afraid of having a panic attack...but now I’m at my aunt’s house and I’m kind of getting a funny feeling, so I better just go home so I don’t have a panic attack.  Seems reasonable, but escaping means your brain can’t learn that you’re actually safe, and it just becomes more and more sensitive to future panic attacks. PART 3 OF THE PANIC SPIRAL: EMOTIONAL AND COGNITIVE Once you’ve had a panic attack, your body pays extra attention to any sign you might have another attack.  So it becomes super sensitive to changes in your body -- your heart flutters, you start breathing kinda funny, your toes get cold.  When you notice those changes, emotional responses will be triggered, often fear and anxiety.  Feelings often come with thoughts.  I’ve alluded to some of the cognitive things that happen once this spiral kicks off...you start thinking about everything you can do to avoid future panic attacks.  You start reasoning with yourself about why it’s best to give up yellow shirts and tacos. You talk yourself into thinking you never really liked going to your grandma’s house anyway.  You notice those weird body sensations and have thoughts like “Oh no!  My feet are tingly!  This is so weird. It’s never happened before.  I better get to a doctor ASAP!”“Ah!  I totally messed up at that meeting.  I need to go home now before people start asking me what went wrong!”“Whoa!  My heart feels weird.  I might be having a heart attack!”“If I go on this date, I’m definitely gonna have a panic attack!”“No!  I can’t have a panic attack now!  I’ll look like a total idiot!” PART 4 OF THE PANIC SPIRAL: SOCIAL The final part of the 4-part spiral that creates panic is what it does to your life more broadly.  Panic attacks cause ripples at home, at work, and in relationships.  When you start to panic, your friends and family might rush over to console you or help you through it.  When your friends and family know you’re anxious about something or worried about having a panic attack, they might let you skip social events or change the event to something you think would be less likely to trigger a panic attack (sounds like a good thing but actually just keeps the panic alive in the future 👎🏻). At work, panic can make it harder to concentrate or keep track of projects and deadlines, so you might end up working extra hours or doing work that doesn’t meet your own expectations.  Some people end up overcommitting to make up for the limitations they think their anxiety is causing, while others allow their coworkers to step in and take on bigger projects….which can limit their own opportunities for challenge and growth.  But even if you are offered a promotion or an exciting opportunity, your fear of how it will impact your panic symptoms could make you turn it down. And a lot of people with panic find themselves isolating from the social aspects of work due to fear of having a panic attack in front of people.  They can really start missing out.  People with panic often spend a lot of time face-to-face with doctors getting weird, random symptoms evaluated.  This is part of the spiral that creates panic. Often, doctors will provide a “no diagnosis” diagnosis and say there is nothing physically wrong causing the weird symptoms.  “But can they really be trusted?” your panic asks. “Did they really investigate everything? Maybe they missed something!” These interactions with physicians and the thoughts and feelings they generate (part 3 of the panic spiral) feed into the overall 4-part spiral.   Need To See These 4 Components Interacting In a Diagram? These four components of the spiral feed into each other and create a nasty dynamic that causes individual panic attacks and maintains fear of future panic attacks, which ultimately makes future panic attacks more likely.  I put all this together in a handy diagram to show you how they work together, so if you’re a visual learner, grab that here.   DIAGRAM OF THE FOUR-PART PANIC SPIRAL In this article, I mentioned that a lot of our behavioral choices that make sense actually keep us stuck.  For panic, this is things like avoiding yellow shirts and not going to your grandma’s house. In fact, for every mental health condition, we make certain choices that seem rational and helpful but are actually keeping the problem alive.  Next week, I’ll share with you 15 coping mechanisms that are keeping you stuck. Are you making any of these mistakes? Don’t miss it. Talk to you soon,Dr. Finch P.S.    Remember, this is education, not treatment.  Always consult with a psychologist or therapist about your mental health to determine what information and interventions are best for you.  See the disclaimer for more details.   Hayden C. Finch, PhD, is a practicing psychologist in Des Moines, Iowa, dedicated to helping you master your mental health.

how to survive a panic attack <3

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Panic attacks are a real problem, and it's important to know how to deal with them. Here I list my 5 favourite grounding techniques for when one hits.

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Some people experience it differently but this is most common symptoms and also what it's like for me. Hope it helps :)

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Over all of the months that I had panic attacks I was trying desperately to gain control, to be in control. I hate the crazy out-of-control feeling of a panic attack. Hate it! I would read the Bible, memorize verses on scripture and quote them while going through the attacks. Most of the time fear stayed and peace seemed distant.

Do you ever feel overwhelmed by sudden anxiety? The difference between panic attacks and anxiety attacks can be confusing. This infographic breaks it down for you. Panic attacks are sudden and intense, while anxiety attacks tend to build up over time. Both can be very distressing, but there are ways to manage them. If you're struggling with anxiety, you're not alone. There are many resources available to help you cope.

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Panic attacks are involuntary reactions of your body to intense fear and distress. Its symptoms vary from person to person and there are no exact symptoms that are felt by everyone for example nausea, dizziness, trouble breathing etc.

Knowing how to calm down from a panic attack is an essential life skill. These 5 simple steps help bring you back to yourself.

How to Help Someone Having a Panic Attack with @drjulie 👉What else do you find helpful? If you have ever tried to help someone through a panic attack you’ll know it can be easy to become overwhelmed yourself. You desperately want to say and do the right thing and don’t want to make it worse. So here are just a few simple tools to add to the toolbox for helping someone through a panic attack.

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