Free Free Yourself from Anxiety by Emma Fletcher Page A

very strange but I didn’t want to tell my mother I was ill.’
B RIDGET
    ‘When my anxiety was very bad I didn’t go outside my home at all, in fact I was confined to the bedroom, and to one side of the bed where I felt safe. Even going to the bathroom was difficult.’
J ULIE
    ‘I could not go out and even panicked when hanging the washing on the line. I was unsteady on my legs and would often feel as if I was going to fall through the ground. Turning my head or getting up from a sitting position made me dizzy and I would have to grab the nearest object to hang on to.’
M ARGARET
    ‘Wash those hands, check that light.
Where’s the energy to win the fight?
Switch the light off, now put it back on.
This O.C.D. has once again won.
Oh no! My hands are dirty again. 
It’s back to the sink and count up to Ten.’
    N ORMAN
    ‘I used to avoid everything.’
P EN
    ‘At first I just used to avoid school assembly, then it was the pictures, and towards the end I wouldn’t even go out in the back garden and put washing out.’
W ENDY

18
Examining Anxiety Behaviours
    There’s no doubt that Anxiety does affect behaviour, although the details will be different for each person. Here are some of the most common Anxiety behaviours.
Escape
    The urge to get out, get away, escape from the situation where the Anxiety or panic strikes can be overwhelming. It’s part of the fight- or-flight mechanism which fills you full of physical energy and makes you want to do something. When you do leave, you find that you start to feel better quite quickly, so you’ll tend to think that escaping makes Anxiety go away. Next time you’ll feel even more keen to escape, and soon a pattern is established.
    It’s important to understand that escaping does not make Anxiety go away. The adrenalin surge of fight-or-flight always dies down, even if you stay put.
Avoidance
    This usually follows on from escape. If getting out of a certain situation appears to make Anxiety go away, then it seems logical to avoid going into the situation in the first place. The problem with this is that pretty soon you’ve got a whole list of things that you can’t do, life becomes a misery and you still suffer from Anxiety.
    As well as avoiding places or situations you might also choose to avoid opening the paper or turning on the TV or radio in case there is an itemabout your phobic subject. You might avoid eye contact in social situations, or avoid using the phone or talking to people.
    Avoidance is the main factor that keeps Anxiety going for agoraphobics, social phobics and people with panic attacks and single phobias. However it can also be an important factor for someone with OCD. If you know that using a public lavatory sets off a need to do rituals, then clearly you’ll want to avoid public lavatories. This is also why someone with, say, a cleaning ritual might well end up doing no cleaning at all – better not to start in the first place.
    The problem with avoidance is that it means you never test out your belief that you will be anxious if you enter the situation or engage with the behaviour.
Doing less
    The physical symptoms of Anxiety can make you feel as if you are physically ill, in fact many people find it hard to believe that their problem is mental rather than physical. You can find yourself doing less and less because you feel so weak, tired and shaky. If you think that your panic attack is actually a heart attack, or that panic will damage your heart, you will retreat to the armchair and behave like an invalid. This is a vicious circle, because the less you do the worse you’ll feel, physically, and the less you’ll feel able to trust that your body will see you through the panic.
Safety behaviours
    Nearly everyone with Anxiety has something they do that they believe keeps them safe. Someone with OCD with rituals, whether physical or mental, is doing that pretty well all the time. The trouble is the effect tends to wear off so that as