Quick Tip for Therapists by Martin M. Antony, PhD, author of Overcoming Health Anxiety and Heather Hood, MA

Although exposure-based treatments can be highly effective for helping clients overcome problems with anxiety, you can enhance treatment outcomes by paying attention to the way that you conduct exposure therapy. Successful exposure therapy follows these guidelines:

Huffington Post has just launched their Weddings section and we’re right there with them! Read The Conscious Bride author Sheryl Paul’s first blog piece.

It's one of our culture's last taboos. We can discuss sex; we can talk about money; we can divulge the darkest secrets about our family history in blog posts and on forums. But when it comes to the fear, doubts, anxiety, and ambivalence that characterize thousands of women's engagement experience every year, we hush up.

So the challenge is, how do we deal with the cultural injunction against feeling anything less than pure joy from "yes" to "I do"?

Quick Tip for Therapists by Bill Knaus EdD , author of The Procrastination Workbook.

Part two of a three-part series on client procrastination

If your client dodges making meaningful changes, this could be connected to a habit of procrastinating. Indeed, you can anticipate that practically every client you see will sometimes procrastinate on following through on dealing with the problem(s) they came to you to help them resolve.

excerpt from The Worrier’s Guide to Overcoming Procrastination

One of the most common questions we get as therapists is, “Why do I procrastinate?” In our view, this question reflects the frustration that comes from suffering anxious procrastination. On the one hand, you know what you need to do. But you don’t do it, or you wait until the last minute. And time and again the pattern repeats itself. You feel caught, trapped in a vortex of anxiety, worry, stress, and procrastination. We wrote this chapter to help you begin to answer the question, “Why do I procrastinate?”

We’ll briefly describe these reasons and then you’ll complete a self-assessment test to see which most frequently lead to procrastination for you.

Fear of Failure: The thought of putting in effort and still failing makes you anxious. Instead of trying and failing, you choose avoiding and procrastinating. You might especially fear the disapproval of others and feel that no matter what you do, you’ll come up short.

Fear of Success: The idea of doing well makes you nervous and panicky. You fear higher expectations, greater responsibilities, and undeserved accolades, and these fears lead you to procrastinate.

Low Self-Confidence: You see yourself as incapable in general. You feel you aren’t good enough and don’t possess the traits that others have which allow them to do well.

Low Self-Efficacy: You feel you’re incapable of meeting the specific challenges of a task. You believe you lack the basic skills to get things done and often think, This is too hard. I can’t do it.

Perfectionism: You believe that things should be done perfectly. You might also believe that other people expect perfection from you. As a result, when faced with a task, you become overwhelmed and easily frustrated by your own unreasonable standards.

Difficulty with Uncertainty: It’s difficult for you to face the unknown, and you feel you must know the outcome before you start. However, since everything in life is uncertain to some extent, you get paralyzed by doubt and turn to worry and avoidance to deal with the uncertainty.

Difficulty Making Decisions: You focus more on information gathering than on actually making a decision. This style of procrastination is closely tied to perfectionism, as you feel you must find out everything possible to avoid an error.

Task Aversion: You tend to think about the unpleasantness of a task. Instead of focusing on the outcome or the pleasure of completing a task, you consider only the challenges of it. Once you’ve convinced yourself the task will be truly awful, you avoid it.

excerpt from Things Might Go Terribly, Horribly Wrong

What we’re driving at is that the things and situations about which we feel anxiety aren’t anchored in the present moment. If we feel apprehension and alarm about something in the here and now, we don’t refer to it as anxiety. Instead, we call it fear. When you think things are going terribly, horribly wrong, fear is what grips you. And, unlike anxiety, which strives to neutralize ambiguity and is only minimally useful in these days of more or less harmless threats, fear is generally pretty useful stuff.

If you hear shrieks and gunfire coming from the room at the end of the hall, you might decide to go the other way. If you’re at the beach and you see a big dorsal fin cutting through the waves, you might put off going for a swim. If unproductive people in your office are getting fired left and right, you might take special care to meet all your deadlines and complete all your tasks. In all these cases, you’re responding to something in the here and now in a way that might protect you from harm.

In addition to how you might respond to the threat of impending misfortune, there are still other ways you’re likely to respond to things actually going terribly, horribly wrong—to situations where bad things are actively happening to you. And as you might imagine, these behaviors, being even more grounded in the present than fear responses, are even less like anxiety. These vary from automatic behaviors that your body initiates without any thought—as happens when you jerk your hand away from something hot—to reactions that you do think about first, such as pulling your car to the side of the road after you’ve been in a collision. In any case, the fact that you’re reacting to some concrete event taking place in the present moment precludes your experience from being anxiety.

excerpt from 10 Simple Solutions to Worry

Why do worry exposure?

There are several reasons why purposely exposing your self to your worries can be beneficial:

• Confronting your worries allows you to practice using the skills that you’ve learned, such as relaxation techniques or cognitive challenges to distorted thinking.
• Intentionally worrying allows you to practice focusing on one thought at a time so you can habituate to the specific worry.
• Because worry exposure decreases anxiety in response to specific thoughts, you’ll be less fearful when those same thoughts arise spontaneously.
• Avoiding thoughts, or using techniques like distraction, maintains fear and can even cause more anxiety and worry. Directly confronting your worries stops that negative cycle.

excerpt from Little Ways to Keep Calm and Carry On

Oh the nerves, the nerves—the mysteries of this machine called man! Oh the little that unhinges it, poor creatures that we are!

—Alderman Cute, in “The Chimes,” by Charles Dickens

Simply said, anxiety is an emotion—but what an emotion it is! Anxiety, like all emotions, has three components: biological (your physical response), cognitive (your accompanying perceptions and thoughts), and behavioral (your actions) (Frijda 1986).

Your body braces for action when the big “A” takes its cue. In a matter of seconds, your body reacts biologically, cognitively, and behaviorally—all in response to a perceived threat. The key word here is “perceived.” As a warning system, anxiety alerts us that something may be wrong, not that something is wrong. When nature’s alarm bell sounds, we need to listen, reflect on it, and determine whether there’s actually a danger or it’s a false alarm.

Excerpt from Calming Your Anxious Mind

Worry is another way thoughts and feelings can affect health. We have seen how worry can be understood as the patterns of thinking driven by feelings of anxiety. Often, the content of the thoughts reflects a person’s attempt to cope with or eliminate the discomfort and ill ease present as part of their experience of anxiety.

• About two-thirds of Americans classify themselves as worriers.
• About half of that group classify themselves as moderate worriers who worry between 10 and 50 percent of the day.
• The rest of the worriers report that they worry more than eight hours a day.
• Worry has been related to health problems. These include cardiac arrhythmias in patients who have had heart attacks, increased blood pressure in laboratory animals, and asthma in both adults and children.
• Uncertainty as an aspect of worry is particularly potent and toxic. When people are confronted by situations of high uncertainty, when they do not know what will happen next or how they should act, they can experience destructive feelings of helplessness and frustration. Uncertainty keeps people in a constant state of semi-arousal, unable to relax, and the price of this ongoing tension and stress is high.

excerpt from Little Ways to Keep Calm and Carry On

It’s very hard to be tense, anxious, or worried when you are physically relaxed. As we noted in lesson 1, anxiety and worry always imply the presence of a perceived threat. Because you believe danger is present, your body prepares to fight or flee. Your heart rate accelerates, your attention sharpens, the blood flow increases to your arms and legs, your muscles tense, and you’re ready for action. But staying wired like this for long periods can be hard on both the body and the spirit. Moreover, high levels of tension don’t promote clear thinking or effective problem solving. It’s time to relax.

Going for a run, a walk, or laps in the pool can also work well. A hot bath or a massage can help, or even a bit of dancing. If nothing else, just stand up in the middle of the room and shake out your tension. Any physical activity that releases physical tension from your body will help. One of the most effective relaxation methods is simply learning how to breathe. Yes, something as simple as breathing from your abdomen rather than using shallow chest breathing offers a host of benefits to your mind and body. You can do this anywhere: in your car, in a meeting, or even in line at the grocery checkout. It doesn’t take planning, time, or a change in your schedule. Try this:

by guest blogger Sheri Van Dijk, MSW, author of The Bipolar Workbook for Teens

I recently read an article about a study that compared high school and college students from 1938 to those in 2007, and concluded that mental health problems such as depression and anxiety are much more of a problem for modern-day students than they were in the past. It does seem that mental illness is affecting more and more people at a younger age – or perhaps we’re just more aware of these kinds of problems now. Regardless, there are things we can do to prepare kids better for the pressures they’ll be facing in life.