Making Sense of Anxiety and Stress: A Comprehensive Stress Management Toolkit

By Saarim Aslam

There’s no denying the troubling uptick in reports of severe anxiety that’s happening all around us. Anxiety and stress are normal emotions that can be an important part of our everyday experience — but when it’s persistent or begins affecting your day-to-day life, it’s important to know what’s going on and how to handle it.

Making Sense of Anxiety and Stress offers a roadmap for understanding and managing stress and anxiety. Drawing from his experience as a research psychologist, Saarim Aslam provides a comprehensive, evidence-based understanding of anxiety and stress that specifically addresses each of the three ways anxiety affects us: in our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Aslam also shares quick tips for dealing with feelings of anxiety in a pinch, as well as exercises so you can begin applying what you’ve learned right away.

Making Sense of Anxiety and Stress is your scientific one stop for managing anxiety, packed with new and time-tested insights on a crucial topic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribd Coach
• Release date: Jul 27, 2021
• ISBN: 9781094426709

Saarim Aslam

Saarim Aslam is a research assistant psychologist. He writes about mental health, psychology and self-improvement. Saarim’s writing can be found on Medium: https://medium.com/@saarim

Book preview

1

Introduction

Hello everyone! This is Making Sense of Anxiety and Stress. Thank you for joining me.

As a researcher in clinical psychology and writer, it’s been a privilege to apply and share what I’ve learned in my profession to help my friends and family members in their lives and careers — especially when it comes to concerns about anxiety and stress.

But for a while now, I’ve noticed a significant rise in anxiety and stress among the people I work with. Anxiety is on the rise; research indicates that it’s the social and political developments happening all around us these days could be a driving factor. Of course, the exact causes may be complex, but the results are clear: Google searches for anxiety ‘are skyrocketing.

Fortunately, we’re all experiencing these tribulations together. We all experience anxiety, and severe anxiety is a common difficulty, so if you’re one of these people, you’re definitely not alone. In this course, we’ll cover a number of approaches for managing your anxiety and how to tackle some specific issues relating to anxiety, each of them relating to a domain affected by anxiety: thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. I’ll also offer some quick tips for dealing with anxiety in a pinch. My goal is that this course will give you a comprehensive, evidence-based understanding of what anxiety is, how it works, and how you can manage it effectively.

Before we start diving into the details, though, let’s start from the top: What is anxiety, and how does it affect us?

The UK’s National Health Service defines anxiety as a feeling of unease, such as worry or fear, that can be mild or severe. The truth is, we will always experience anxiety at some point, or more likely multiple points, throughout our lives. You might get anxious when you speak to someone new, or if you’re about to take a test or have an interview. This type of anxiety is usually mild; it comes and goes and doesn’t really affect our functioning. In other words — and this is crucial — anxiety is a natural response to the perception of something that is a threat to us.

If anxiety persists for an extended period of time (say, several months) and begins to really affect your day-to-day functioning, then it’s possible you may be grappling with an anxiety disorder. This can lead us to stop leaving the house or stop us from doing the activities that we enjoy.

Of course, it’s up to a qualified professional to give someone a diagnosis of anxiety. But the key point here is that anxiety becomes a disorder when it really impacts our lives for a while.

There are multiple anxiety disorders. One of the most common is ‘generalized anxiety disorder,’ which refers to persistent anxiety to a variety of events. There’s social anxiety, which is extreme worry or fear about being judged by others. Phobia is another example: A phobia is extreme, irrational fear towards a certain object or situation. There’s even more, but as you can see, anxiety can manifest in many different ways.

So we know what anxiety is now, but how does it