Reflection: Overcoming My Anxiety (Essay Example)

Section 1

Anxiety, although similar in symptomology to common nerves, is a completely different experience. Being nervous is a response to a specific experience, like public speaking, an important exam, or a first date. Nerves are normal, healthy manifestations of emotion. It protects us from danger and keeps us alert and aware when handling perceived threats. Adrenaline is released and blood is directed to heart and limbs as the body prepares a reaction. As we age, we become accustomed to these feelings of nervousness. They are a part of growing up. In many instances, these feelings protect us from harm. However, for a rising number of people, harmless nerves can turn into serious debilitating emotions. Anxiety is a feeling that shares more characteristics with fear than it does with nervousness. Many people tend to use the term anxiety interchangeably with stress or worry, but this is not the case. Anxiety occurs when a sense of fear and worry permeates everyday situations, even ones that are not considered stressful to the average person. This may be making phone calls, attending social gatherings, or exposure to loud noises. It can be debilitating and prevents average people from going about their normal lives. 

I have dealt with an anxiety disorder since I was a child. Where the majority of children are nervous before the first day of school, I would make myself physically ill with fear. As a grew up, my unmanaged anxiety became worse. I became unable to do many of the activities that my peers found easy – such as doing my weekly grocery store shopping. I have made great progress through aging and therapy but find that I still have difficult days. I find myself frequently struggling with shopping inside at stores. At the start of the project, I had not shopped inside a grocery store in over 6 months instead relying on “curbside pickup” to deliver my food to me. At 22 years old, I no longer can avoid these common activities without drastically negatively affecting my life. The goal I set for myself in this project is to feel half as anxious as I usually do while at a store of any kind. At the end I hoped to able to do more shopping inside the store without becoming overwhelmed by my anxiety. For the assignment, I went inside of a store every day. This ranged from going in the gas station to pay for my gas instead of doing it outside to doing a weekly shop to the grocery store. 

Section 2

The first method of emotion regulation I tried was creating cognitive change by reappraisal of meaning. This is when what is causing the emotion is thought of in a different way. While difficult to do, I felt that this would be a good way to push myself out of my comfort zone and begin the project.  I decided I was going to spend time trying to think of my anxiety as a factor that motivates me instead of prevents me from normal activities. While it seemed daunting to me before beginning the project, I imagined how I would feel once I achieved my goal of feeling less anxiety. Reappraisal has been linked to decreased negative affect, decreased activation in the amygdala, and increased activation in prefrontal region (McRae, 2010). The brain is does not send the body into survival mode, thus preventing any negative symptoms linked to anxiety like an increased heart and breathing rate to take place. The use of reappraisal in handling my anxiety is clear: without my body telling me it was time to panic, I would be able to think of the situation from a more neutral perspective.  

The next method of emotional regulation I used was seeking social support to help me through my anxiety. I have a great support system of people who are more than willing to listen to me and help me through any issues. However, I still think of my anxiety as something to be ashamed of. It embarrasses me and it’s not something I want everyone to know about. I knew it would be a struggle, but instead of trying to hide my anxiety, I decided I would be more open about it and seek solutions from people who I am with. I enlisted my mom’s help in this task, asking her to be available during my shopping time so I could call her to calm me down. She acted as my support system and provided a great amount of help in the process. Social support is critical for the cultivation of good mental health and positive self-thought. The feeling of loneliness is known the exacerbate mental health problems in college-aged people (Richardson et al., 2017). Without a sense of community, negative thoughts can snowball and allow a stressful situation to become an anxiety attack. In using social support to regulate my anxiety, I would be able to cope with my stress when I started to feel overwhelmed in the store. 

Finally, I used situation modification to take charge of my anxiety instead of allowing it to dictate how I felt and responded to certain situations. In this case, I decided to prepare myself by creating a “game plan”. I would write out a list of ingredients I needed and organized them in the order of their placement in the store. From front to back, I knew the path I would take and exactly what I was looking for instead of entering the situation unprepared. Situation modification is used to disengage from processing emotions by stopping a triggering experience before it becomes uncontrollable. (Van Bockstaele et al., 2020). In this way, the experience that causes my anxiety will be changed and modified so I am unable to feel anxiety. By preparing my shopping trip before I entered the store, I will be using situation modification to remove a possible source of my anxiety – the unpredictability of shopping. 

Section 3

By far the strategy that worked the best for me was using social support to help me work through my anxiety. As seen in Figure 1, my assessment of how easy I found the change when using social support was almost double the other methods I tried. This outcome was not a surprise to me, as I am very close with my mom, who I used as my support person. She has consistently been the person I turn to when I struggle with my mental health. Just knowing that she was a phone call away was incredibly helpful and gave me a sense of calm that I rarely experience while shopping. Close relationships commonly involve participation in activities that provide pleasure and can be used as a distraction from stress (Vandervoort, 1999). While I spent time shopping, I called my mom when I began to feel stress. Even just hearing her voice was calming to me. In addition, she was able to provide as a distraction from the stimuli in the store by talking to me about other topics. She provided both emotional support in a time I felt stressed and served as a distraction from possible emotional triggers. 

The worst strategy outcome was situation modification. This was not what I expected, as I assumed it would be the most helpful to me. I am a meticulous planner and I feel I excel in situations where I am allowed to focus on details. Upon arrival to the store, I became flustered by the amount of people near the entrance. My plan had already been disrupted and it felt as though I couldn’t continue with my “game plan”. Situation modification worked better in following days of attempting the strategy. I found it worked best in shorter, smaller shopping trips where there were less people and in smaller stores. As seen in Figure 1, my feeling of anxiety was least changed by this strategy than the others. Situation modification tends to be more of a coping mechanism than a method for treating anxiety. While situation modification helps many people tackle their mental health issues, the tactic can prevent complete exposure to triggering situations, which tends to prevent the ability for long term benefits and behavior changes to develop (Gross, 2015). Since I was avoiding the main trigger of my anxiety, the unpredictability, I was not confronting the issue but working around it.