BEHAVIORAL HEALTH

Justin Monty, MSSA, LSW

Q: I noticed that I have been experiencing anxiety. Sometimes, it just pops up out of nowhere. What are some ways in which I can help decrease it?

A: Anxiety can be a very uncomfortable feeling. Even if you've experienced it many times before, it's something that you will never enjoy. At Premier Behavioral Health Services, we specialize in Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT). The principles and skills that are DBT-focused can be beneficial for people who live with anxiety. Many of these skills fall under a category known as “Distress Tolerance.” The name is very straight forward: you have a distressing event/ experience and the goal of the skills is for you to tolerate it and get through the experience without making it more difficult. The skill I'm going to discuss here is going to sound obvious, but it's something that everyone has to do survive… breathing. More specifically, we're going to use paced breathing as a way to help bring you down from the heightened emotional state that anxiety brings to your life. When we are stressed and anxious, our body's Sympathetic Nervous System, AKA the Fight-or-Flight Response, is activated. This causes our heart rate and blood pressure to rise, our pupils dilate, and a bunch of other not so fun symptoms. Paced breathing can help to activate our Parasympathetic Nervous System, which causes us to slow down and we are able to better regulate our emotions. So, just breathe! Focus on taking long inhales, followed by exhales of the same length. It may help to count to ensure that your inhales and exhales match. You can close your eyes or focus on one spot or item in the room you're in at that time. This isn't going to be an immediate fix for your anxiety, so do this for as long as you need to. Try for at least 10 minutes to really give your body time to slow down from your heightened emotional, anxious state.

Justin Monty, MSSA, LSW

Premier Behavioral Health Service 8701 Mentor Avenue Mentor 44060 440-266-0770