Anxiety refers to an uncomfortable experience in which a person feels like they are in danger or otherwise at risk, and they find it hard to settle down from this feeling. Physical symptoms may include rapid breathing, increased heart rate, muscle tension, lightheadedness, dizziness, tingling, sweating and flushing. These are all associated with your survival response, and would be useful to you if you needed to protect yourself from a current physical threat. We start to label these feelings as anxiety when they exist in the absence of a physical or social threat.

A key to managing your anxiety is to understand where it comes from. Consider the following questions:

One of the most important things that many of us do that helps keep our anxiety levels high is that we tend to avoid things that make us anxious. When we avoid the things that we feel anxious about, we miss out on opportunities to learn that we can cope with the thing that makes us anxious.

There are a few exercises that have been shown to help with anxiety: