Overcoming Anxiety For Dummies, 2nd Edtion Read online

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  About This Book

  An Important Message to Our Readers

  Conventions Used in This Book

  What You're Not to Read

  Foolish Assumptions

  How This Book Is Organized

  Part I: Detecting and Exposing Anxiety

  Part II: Battling Anxiety

  Part III: Letting Go of the Battle

  Part IV: Zeroing in on Specific Worries

  Part V: Helping Others with Anxiety

  Part VI: The Part of Tens

  Icons Used in This Book

  Where to Go from Here

  Part I

  Chapter 1: Analyzing and Attacking Anxiety

  Anxiety: Everybody's Doing It

  Tabulating the Costs of Anxiety

  What does anxiety cost you?

  Adding up the cost to society

  Recognizing the Symptoms of Anxiety

  Thinking anxiously

  Behaving anxiously

  Finding anxiety in your body

  Seeking Help for Your Anxiety

  Matching symptoms and therapies

  Choosing where to start

  Finding the right help

  Chapter 2: Examining Anxiety: What's Normal, What's Not

  Knowing When Anxiety Is a Help and When It's a Hindrance

  Presenting the Seven Types of Anxiety

  Generalized anxiety disorder: The common cold of anxiety

  Social phobia: Avoiding people

  Panic disorder: Way beyond everyday anxiety

  Agoraphobia: Panic's companion

  Specific phobias: Spiders, snakes, airplanes, and other scary things

  Post-traumatic stress disorder: Feeling the aftermath

  Obsessive-compulsive disorder: Over and over and over again

  Seeing How Anxiety Differs from Other Disorders

  Chapter 3: Sorting Through the Brain and Biology

  Examining the Anxious Brain

  Seeing how the brain's circuits are connected

  Communicating chemicals

  Preparing to Fight or Flee

  Mimicking Anxiety: Drugs, Diet, and Diseases

  Exploring anxiety-mimicking drugs

  Ingesting anxiety from your diet

  Investigating medical anxiety imposters

  Chapter 4: Clearing the Roadblocks to Change

  Digging Out the Roots of Anxiety

  It's in my genes!

  It's how I was raised!

  It's the world's fault!

  Finding Self-Acceptance

  Having Second Thoughts about Change

  Deciding to Get the Show on the Road

  Arguing with your arguments

  Taking baby steps

  Watching Worries Come and Go

  Following your fears

  Writing about your worries

  Getting Help from Others

  Seeking the right therapies

  Seeking the right therapist

  Part II

  Chapter 5: Becoming a Thought Detective

  Distinguishing Thoughts from Feelings

  Blocking the blues

  Getting in touch with your feelings

  Getting in touch with your thoughts

  Tracking Your Thoughts, Triggers, and Feelings

  Tackling Your Thoughts: Thought Therapy

  Weighing the evidence: Thought court

  Rethinking risk

  Deconstructing worrisome scenarios

  Cultivating Calm Thinking

  Considering a "friend's" perspective

  Creating calm

  Affirming affirmations?

  Chapter 6: Watching Out for Worry Words

  Stacking Sticks into Bonfires of Anxiety

  Encountering extremist words

  Misrepresenting with all-or-none, black-or-white words

  Running into judging words

  Turning to victim words

  Tracking Your Worry Words

  Refuting and Replacing Your Worry Words

  Exorcising your extremist words

  Disputing all-or-none

  Judging the judge

  Vanquishing victim words

  Chapter 7: Busting Up Your Agitating Assumptions

  Understanding Agitating Assumptions

  Sizing Up Anxious Schemas

  Recognizing schemas

  Assessing your agitating assumptions

  Coming Down with a Case of Anxious Schemas

  Acquiring assumptions in childhood

  Shattering your reasonable assumptions

  Challenging Those Nasty Assumptions: Running a Cost/Benefit Analysis

  Analyzing perfection

  Tabulating approval

  Reviewing vulnerability

  Counting up control

  Debating dependency

  Challenging your own anxious schemas

  Designing Calm, Balanced Assumptions

  Tempering perfectionist tendencies

  Balancing an approval addict

  Balancing vulnerability

  Relaxing control

  Diminishing dependency

  Above All: Be Kind to Yourself!

  Chapter 8: Facing Fear One Step at a Time

  Exposure: Coming to Grips with Your Fears

  Getting ready by relaxing

  Understanding your fears

  Constructing a staircase of fear

  Imagining the worst

  Facing your fears (gulp)

  Conquering All Types of Fears

  Waging war on worry: GAD

  Fighting specific and social phobias

  Pushing through panic and agoraphobia

  Taking on post-traumatic stress disorder

  Overriding an obsessive-compulsive disorder

  Expecting the Impossible

  Chapter 9: Considering Medications and Other Physical Treatment Options

  Making Up Your Mind About Medications

  The downside of medications

  The upside of medications

  Understanding Medication Options

  Antidepressants

  Benzodiazepines

  Miscellaneous tranquilizers

  Beta blockers

  Atypical antipsychotics

  Mood stabilizers

  A few intriguing medication options

  Searching for Supplements

  Viva vitamins!

  Sifting through the slew of supplements

  Stimulating the Brain

  Vagus nerve stimulation (VNS)

  Deep brain stimulation (DBS)

  Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS)

  Part III

  Chapter 10: Looking at Lifestyle

  Friends and Family — Can't Live with 'em, Can't Live without 'em

  Staying connected to others

  Delegating for extra time

  Just saying "no"

  Ready . . . Exorcise!

  Don't wait for willpower — Just do it!

  Working in your workout

  The ABCs of Getting Your Zs

  Creating a sleep haven

  Following a few relaxing routines

  What to do when sleep just won't come

  Designing Calm Diets

  Enjoying small, frequent portions

  Following nutritional common sense

  Chapter 11: Relaxation: The Five-Minute Solution

  Blowing Anxiety Away

  Discovering your natural breathing pattern

  Breathing like a baby

  Using panic breathing in high-stress situations

  Relaxing Your Whole Body
/>   Knowing what to expect

  Discovering the progressive muscle technique

  Applying Relaxation in Tense Situations

  Relaxing through Your Senses

  Sounds to soothe the savage beast

  Only the nose knows for sure

  Massaging away stress

  Chapter 12: Creating Calm in Your Imagination

  Letting Your Imagination Roam

  Imagining touch

  Recalling sounds

  Remembering tastes

  Conjuring up smells

  Painting pictures in your mind

  Full Sensory Imaging

  Relaxing at the beach

  A forest fantasy

  Customizing Your Own Images

  Chapter 13: Mindful Acceptance

  Accepting Anxiety? Hey, That's a Switch!

  Taking a calm, dispassionate view

  Tolerating uncertainty

  Being patient with yourself

  Letting Go of Ego

  Inflating and deflating the self-esteem balloon

  Appreciating your imperfections

  Connecting with the Here and Now

  Making contact with the present

  Putting worries about the future to rest

  Mindfully meditating

  Accepting Mindfulness into Your Life

  Savoring Spirituality

  Part IV

  Chapter 14: Facing a Career Crisis and Financial Woes

  Meeting Job Worries Head-On

  Shoring up your resume

  Finding flexibility in your career view

  Considering careers with stability

  Keeping the right focus

  Taking Stock of Your Resources

  Tallying up your financial balance sheet

  Knowing your personal assets and liabilities

  Committing to a New Game Plan

  Setting short-term goals

  Planning for the long haul

  Chapter 15: Keeping Steady When the World Is Shaking

  Assessing Your Risks

  Looking at the likelihood of dying from a natural disaster

  Tabulating your personal risks

  Preparing a Plan for Realistic Worries

  Imagining and Dealing with the Worst

  Rethinking uncertainty and anxiety

  Rethinking your ability to cope

  Going right at your worries

  Doing Your Part to Improve the World

  Helping the environment

  Volunteering in disasters

  Chapter 16: Staying Healthy

  Figuring Out the Connection between Worry and Health

  Recalculating the Costs and Benefits of Health Worry

  Tabulating Risks of the Modern World

  Examining the evolving realities of diseases and treatments

  Weighing local versus global health risks

  Watching out for exaggerated claims

  Taking an Inventory of Your Personal Health

  Checking out your lifestyle

  Accepting your genetic risks

  Designing a Health Action Plan

  Chapter 17: Keeping Out of Danger

  Evaluating Your Actual, Personal Risks

  Maximizing Your Preparedness

  Taking charge of personal safety

  Avoiding unnecessary risks

  Dealing with Trauma

  Thinking through what happened

  Exposing yourself to the incident

  Accepting a Certain Degree of Uncertainty

  Choosing to put yourself in high-risk situations

  Experiencing danger in everyday places

  Part V

  Chapter 18: When a Family Member or Friend Suffers from Anxiety

  Discovering Whether Your Loved One Suffers from Anxiety

  Talking Together about Anxiety

  Helping without owning the albatross

  Avoiding blame

  When help turns into harm

  Guiding the Way

  Coaching the right way

  Looking at a coach in action

  Teaming Up against Anxiety

  Accepting Anxiety with Love

  Chapter 19: Recognizing Anxiety in Kids

  Separating Normal from Abnormal

  Inspecting the Most Common Childhood Anxiety Disorders

  Leaving parents: Separation anxiety disorder

  Worrying all the time: Generalized anxiety disorder

  Focusing on phobias: Specific phobias

  Connecting with others: Social phobia

  Anxious repetition: Obsessive-compulsive disorder

  Rare anxieties among children

  Chapter 20: Helping Kids Conquer Anxiety

  Nipping Anxiety in the Bud

  Early mastery experiences

  Fine-tuning emotions

  Inoculating against anxiety

  Taking precautions via parenting style

  Helping Already Anxious Children

  Helping yourself first

  Modeling mellow

  Leading children through anxiety

  Relaxing to reduce anxiety

  Exorcizing anxiety through exercise

  Getting Help from Others

  Who to get help from

  What to expect at the first session

  What happens in therapy?

  Part VI

  Chapter 21: Ten Ways to Stop Anxiety Quickly

  Breathing Out Your Anxiety

  Talking with a Friend

  Exercising Aerobically

  Soothing the Body

  Drinking Tea

  Challenging Your Anxious Thinking

  Listening to Music

  Finding Distractions

  Having Sex

  Staying with the Moment

  Chapter 22: Ten Ways to Deal with Relapse

  Expecting Anxiety

  Counting the Swallows

  Checking Out Why Anxiety Returned

  Seeing a Doctor

  Revisiting What Worked Before

  Doing Something Different

  Getting Support

  Considering Booster Sessions

  Looking at the Stages of Change

  Accepting Anxiety

  Chapter 23: Ten Signs That You Need Professional Help

  Having Suicidal Thoughts or Plans

  Feeling Hopeless

  Handling Anxiety and Depression

  Trying to No Avail

  Struggling at Home

  Dealing with Major Problems at Work

  Suffering from Severe Obsessions or Compulsions

  Understanding Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder

  Going through Sleepless Nights

  Getting High

  Finding Help

  Appendix: Resources for You

  Self-Help Books

  Resources to Help Children

  Accessing Web Sites to Discover More about Anxiety

  Overcoming Anxiety For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

  by Charles H. Elliott, PhD, and Laura L. Smith, PhD

  Overcoming Anxiety For Dummies®

  Published by

  Wiley Publishing, Inc.

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  Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774

  www.wiley.com

  Copyright © 2010 by Wiley Publishing, Inc., Indianapolis, Indiana

  Published simultaneously in Canada

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