Act behavioral, when we change how we respond to situations that make us anxious, we can learn new
behaviors that lessen our fears.
Let's review some strategies for using our actions to combat our anxiety approach.
What you fear facing our fears head on is called exposure therapy in CBT and is the antidote to that
avoidance that maintains and anxiety.
This assumes, of course, that what we fear is not actually very risky.
Facing a dog that bites won't fix our phobia of animals.
For example, exposure to the things that scares us decreases our anxiety by allowing our nervous system
to learn that the danger is exaggerated, giving us confidence that we can face our fears without being
overwhelmed, reinforcing our awareness that an anxiety is not dangerous.
Hundreds of studies have found that exposure is a powerful weapon against overblown, and anxiety will
go through a step by step plan for implementing exposure.
Phase your physical manifestations of fear and anxiety about our anxiety can present an additional challenge.
Panic disorder, in particular, can feature a fear of the panic related physical sensations.
For example, a person might avoid running because the resulting shortness of breath and bounding heart
are similar to the feelings during Banach.
Avoiding physical sensations only strengthens our fear and makes us more sensitive to the sensations.
Exposure therapy can decrease our fear of physical and anxiety symptoms.
For example, we can do jumping jacks to cause breathlessness, spin and share to induce dizziness or
we are warm clothes to make ourselves sweat.
Doing these kinds of things repeatedly lessens our fear of the physical sensations.