What Can We Do To Prevent The Recurrence Of Anxiety?
Anxiety is so present in our modern lives that sometimes it is not impossible to overflow it. It is the moment when we finally start looking for ways to solve that problem. We go to the doctor or psychologist and put the strategy on their feet… But what about after that; how can we prevent the recurrence of anxiety?
We can engage ourselves with a variety of aids that can help us in our goal of preventing anxiety from returning to our lives. In this article, we talk about these aids and how they can be used to avoid a recurrence of anxiety.
Tell me what treatment you have gone through and I will tell you how to prevent recurrence
The first thing you need to keep in mind is that preventing recurrence depends on the treatment we have gone through in the past to manage anxiety. It may not seem essential, but it is the most important thing.
If we have taken some antidepressant in the past, it is more difficult for us to prevent recurrence. Let me explain. We are taking a drug that does cause anxiety levels to drop, but if this does not happen in conjunction with psychological therapy, we have no other strategies for managing anxiety alongside medication.
If, on the other hand, you’ve visited a good psychologist, he or she has certainly given you some ways to manage your emotions, which you can then use in situations where you lose your balance. So we can use those means and avoid turning to drugs. Therefore, even if it requires more effort on our part, psychological intervention is preferable to prevent recurrence.
What can we do at an early stage to prevent recurrence?
If you have chosen a suitable psychologist, one that focuses on cognitive behavior, you have probably been given some tools to manage your thoughts and feelings during your therapy. But just like all the skills we learn over the course of our lives, we must continue to practice them if we don’t want to lose them.
Doing some exercises, albeit only occasionally, should be the first step in preventing a recurrence of anxiety. Consider, for example, how when we learn a new language we lose our skills very quickly if we stop speaking that language. The same goes for anxiety – if we stop using emotion management tools, it’s harder for us to use them when we really need them.
That means we need to maintain the changes we got in therapy. The work doesn’t end when the intervention is over and the psychologist lets us home. It is maintained in our daily lives, so our mental health depends to a large extent on our own efforts.
One step forward in preventing recurrence
Not only do you need to continue practicing, but you also need to remember the knowledge you received in therapy mindset. Thus, the important role of thoughts in the mental process is not thrown into the box of oblivion. You already know that we all have unacceptable thoughts, so you should pay attention to identifying, categorizing, and questioning them if they seem suspicious.
It will also help you identify those situations that may develop anxiety. That way we can use the tools we worked hard for. Remember that you have already learned to solve problems in the past, so you can see the following problems as challenges or tasks, not threats that jeopardize abstract things.
Don’t forget that the sun doesn’t shine quite as brightly every day. Let me explain. Each of us has bad days, it’s kind of a natural part of being human. However, we can decide how we face those days or whether a badly started day does not continue on a bad day. In fact, many days that start badly continue as such because of our anxiety. It makes us lose our meaning and has the role of a wizard that creates the phenomenon of self-fulfilling prophecy.
Finally, if you need to go to a psychologist again, there is nothing wrong with that. It is by no means a failure and it does not mean that you have lost everything you have achieved so far. It’s best to do it early on before the anxiety gets stronger!
Photos provided by Mike Wilson, Malik Earnest and Mauro Mora.
