What Techniques Do Not Work For Anxiety?

By Vidhya Raghavan

Anxiety can be a debilitating experience.  People from all walks of life go through their daily lives in discomfort and isolation due this experience.  Whilst there are plenty of theories, strategies and techniques out there, a few of the commonly well known ones do not work.  It is necessary to rethink our expectations of some of these strategies.

Here's some of them:

• 1. "Put Yourself Out There": This one is a definite ‘No' ‘No' - simply for the reason that if you are doing more of the same thing, you are probably going to come back more defeated and less confident. However, if you had a few things you could change about your strategy in approaching people, a few fall back conversation topics, even a slightly different reasons to perceive yourself differently - you can probably make a bit of a difference in your social behaviour.

• 2. Counselling: Whilst counselling is a specialised skill in dealing with emotional history, changing behaviours and gives the benefit of being heard and empathised with - on its own, it does not work. There is still a missing link. The client has to go and deal with the situation by themselves which is highly daunting.

If the client is facing for example anxiety about social situations, the client really needs a social role model/mentor for learning the new behaviour - whereby the role model looks out for them while they are learning new behaviours, introduce the client to a few networks,  the and the client can actually model a few specific strategies such as - picking a friendly group as an entry point, breaking the ice, opening statements, stretching a conversation, keeping momentum, silence fillers, closing a conversation and moving on to the next group, subtle ways to shake off a button holer, strategies to follow up with new found friends.

• 3. Medication: Medication certainly has its place - as in helps control, relieve, suppress the issue and helps you get by your daily life - but it is definitely not the be all and end all.

Is it then highly possible, that there may be other subtler, gentler ways to get past the anxiety and slip into being socially adept without your even realising it???