Other Stress Relieving Techniques

Coping With Anxiety

Unfortunately, too many people fail to cope successfully with dysfunctional anxiety and only make matters worse. You may do drugs, drink alcohol, or in some other manner alter your state of consciousness to avoid dealing with the anxiety provoking stimulus. Obviously, these are only temporary solutions and are accompanied by unhealthy consequences. You not only keep your anxiety, but you now have a drug habit to boot.

Re-labeling

Taking note of the selective awareness method, you can re-label any negative experience as a positive one. All that is required is to focus upon the positive aspects rather than the negative ones. If you have test anxiety, you could consider it an opportunity to find out or to show others how much you know. Rather than conceptualizing an airplane ride as risking your life, you can re-label it as an opportunity to ride on a sea of clouds or to see your hometown from a totally new and interesting vantage point.

Environmental Planning

Sometimes it is appropriate to adjust your life and environment to avoid the anxiety-provoking stimulus. For those anxious in crowds, living in a small town will probably be preferable to living in a large city.

Self-Talk
 
This technique requires some objectivity. You must ask yourself what the real risk is in the anxiety-provoking situation. Self-talk may be used to realize that people are generally polite. They won't boo or throw tomatoes. If they thought that you are absurd, they'd probably take listening so as not to appear rude. The worst that could realistically happen is they won't ask you back again. That would mean you'd have more time to do other things. That's not so bad, at all.

Thought Stopping
 
As simple as it sounds, when you experience negative thoughts, you can shut them off. To employ thought stopping, you should learn deep muscle relaxation techniques. Then, whenever you have anxious thoughts you want to eliminate, tell yourself that you will not allow these thoughts to continue, and use the relaxation method. The pleasant sensations of relaxation will reinforce the stopping of anxious thoughts, as well as prevent these thoughts from resulting in potentially harmful physiological consequences.

Systematic Desensitization
 
Systematic desensitization involves imagining or experiencing an anxiety-provoking scene while practicing a response incompatible with anxiety. Widely used by psychotherapists, this method was found to be nearly as effective when people used it by themselves.

On the next page we will talk about other Relaxation Techniques you can use to Reduce Stress.