Free Anxiety Self Help:
Learn how to overcome anxiety and excessive worrying at home:
This page is dedicated to helping you understand what anxiety is and how to overcome excessive worrying without the need for therapy.
However, self-help is not for everyone, and if you struggle or feel you need the help of a trained therapist, please don’t hesitate to book in a session.
I am an anxiety specialist and author of:
What is Anxiety?
Anxiety is a normal reaction to stress. It can range from mild discomfort to severe panic. You may notice physical sensations such as a fast heartbeat, sweating, and faster breathing. While occasional anxiety is normal, some people suffer from chronic anxiety and feel constantly on edge or as if something bad is going to happen.
How is it treated?
Excessive worrying is highly treatable using Cognitive Behavioural therapy (CBT) and usually less than 12 sessions is required for most people.
Can I treat myself?
The simple answer is yes. Although some may require the help of a trained CBT therapist to guide them in this process, it is possible to treat your chronic worrying and anxiety yourself. This page has a series of free videos and tools designed to help you achieve this at home.
How?
Self help for excessive worrying relies on a few main things:
Understanding: The first step is to understand what is the root cause of your excessive worrying and anxiety and how we respond to it. Often the actions we take to help our anxiety might actually be the very thing causing our problem.
Courage to change: You probably wish your “anxiety” could just disappear. However, anxiety is a normal human emotion, so it can not be avoided. However, it can be reduced so it does not consume your life. The way to reduce anxiety is to actually learn to tolerate small amounts of it now. This requires you to have the courage to try something new. This may sounds scary, however most people realise how useful and effective it can be.
Practice: CBT offers us strategies which over time change our relationship with anxiety and worrying. There is no magic tool that instantly cures you from day one. They need to be repeated and practiced for them to work.
What maintains our anxiety?
Chronic anxiety and worrying is maintained by two things.
1) Intolerance of uncertainty.
2) Worry behaviours (also know as safety behaviours).
By understanding and overcoming these you can break out of your anxiety.
While these terms might be confusing, they are actually really simple concepts that you can understand in just a few minutes.
Watch the video below to understand what these two concepts are.
To beat anxiety we first need to define what it actually is.
Where does chronic worrying come from (intolerance of uncertainty) and what keeps us trapped in a spiral of worrying (worry behaviours).
1 - Understanding anxiety:
Now you understand more about anxiety, intolerance of uncertainty and worry behaviours, its time to help you understand your own worry experience.
“Well I already know that well, I live it everyday…” - True… but often when we experience something, we are too close to it to see it clearly. I bet you didn’t even know there was two types of worries? And both need to be treated in the opposite way. Lets move you from being the centre of your anxiety, to observing it, its cause, the thoughts going through your mind and how it causes you to react.
Watch this video to understand how to become more aware of your worry experience.
Worry Awareness Training:
Learn how to record your worries and how you respond to them, and how to categorise them as hypothetical or practical.
Usually people’s first response to being asked to record their worries is a bit of resistance.
You may have noticed thoughts such as “I will just skip to the next part”, "This will be boring”, “This will make me too anxious” or just “No thanks”.
And that is okay, just acknowledge your mind is trying to protect you from failing before you even start. However, if you are on this website it sounds like you want to get better. So give it ago! Record your worries for a week and just see what happens.
How to deal with hypothetical worries -Worry Time:
One week later:
Now you have become better at recording and categorising your worries. You should be able to notice the difference between hypothetical and practical worries. Both these worries have different solutions. Hypothetical worries are outside of our control, so when we use are worry behaviours on them, we only give ourselves an illusion of control, which feeds are anxiety problem.
We need to learn to tolerate them. An amazing tool to learn this skill is called “Worry Time”.
Watch this video for a full explanation of how to use Worry Time.
Worry Time is a fantastic tool for teaching you how to tolerate worries that we have no control over. Within a week or two, most people who really dedicate their time to this skill show a big reduction in anxiety and frequency of worrying.
Two things determine the success of worry time:
1) Practice - Practice practice practice is the key to success with worry time.
2) Reflection - You need to learn something through the process. What does being able to tolerate these types of worries without responding to them show you about “uncertain situations”. If you did nothing to prevent your fear and nothing catastrophic happens…
What does this say about “uncertain situations”, do they always lead to bad outcomes?
When something negative did happen, was the outcomes catastrophic?
Have you learnt you can cope?
What does this say about “uncertainty” being as negative as you originally perceived it to be?
How to deal with practical worries -Problem Solving:
Practical worries are worries have control over. Often in response to problems, people tend to avoid dealing with the issue, postpone it to later or try ineffective solutions to overcome them.
This is often due to having a negative mindset about what problems mean. You may:
See problems as not normal - You may have thoughts such as “people shouldn’t have problems”, “problems are not normal”, or you may simply “hate problems”.
You may doubt your own ability to solve problems -You may have thoughts such as “I can cope”, “I am not smart enough”, “Nothing I do works”, “I am bad at solving things” or “I cant do it on my own”.
You may ne pessimistic about problems being able to be fixed - You may have thoughts such as “Nothing I do matters”, “It cant be solved”, “I have already tried everything”, “There is no point”, “Nothing I do works”, or “The problem is too big to fix”.
If you have this type of negative mindset, no wonder you decide to avoid, postpone or fail to fix your problems. The issue with this is, problems don’t often fix themselves, if anything problems grow bigger. The longer we take to solve them, the harder they become. And if you wait to long and struggle to fix it, that only convinces you more about that negative view of problems that stopped you in the first place.
So we have to learn to deal with problems quickly and effectively. We do this using a tool called “Problem Solving”.
Watch this video for a full explanation of how to use Problem Solving.
This video focuses on how anxiety stops us from effectively dealing with life problems and what we can do to combat this. It teaches you how to deal with problems without avoiding or putting them off until later.
Just like with worry time, the same two things determine the success of Problem Solving:
1) Practice - Practice practice practice is the key to success. The more you solve problem, the better you become at it.
2) Reflection - You need to learn something through the process. Overcoming problems helps build your confidence over time, and teaches you that problems are not an unusual part of life, and that you have the capacity to deal with life’s problems without becoming overwhelmed.
I totally recommend this book (and not just because I wrote it 😅). It goes into detail about each of the videos we covered an contains worksheets and much more.
Click on the image to go to Amazon.
Need more help:
Or book in a session with myself to really get to the core of your anxiety and we can overcome it together.