Re: If Only Anxiety Worked ThatWay
Edel Dieringer
The final step in leading through anxiety is making sure you have ongoing support. This means not only surrounding yourself with the right people but also developing routines that help you deal with bouts of anxiety and lay the groundwork for maintaining your mental health.
The objective is to learn to cope with anxiety rather than exacerbating those anxious thoughts and feelings. Tsao suggests some simple tactics, like establishing clear work boundaries (e.g., only checking your work email a couple of times on weekends), taking a refreshing walk in the middle of the day, or sharing your thoughts with a loved one.
Puppies should be well socialized with other animals and people (See handout "Puppy Behavior and Training - Socialization and Fear Prevention"). Puppies need to learn how to have alone time and amuse themselves with their toys. When you bring your puppy out of alone time to socialize with the family, make sure that you only get him when he is quietly playing with his toys. Reward the behaviors that you want your puppy to continue. A well adjusted puppy should do well either alone or with the family and will be less likely to have separation anxiety in the future.
Separation anxiety describes dogs that usually are overly attached or dependent on family members. They become extremely anxious and show distress behaviors such as vocalization, destruction, or house soiling when separated from the owners. Most dogs with separation anxiety try to remain close to their owners, follow them from room to room and rarely spend time outdoors alone. They often begin to display anxiety as soon as the owners prepare to leave. Many but not all of these dogs crave a great deal of physical contact and attention from their owners. During departures or separations, in addition to vocalization, destruction and elimination, they may be restless, shake, shiver, salivate, refuse to eat, or become quiet and withdrawn. Although typically the behavior occurs every time the owner leaves, in some cases it may only happen on selected departures, such as workday departures, or when the owner leaves again after coming home from work. Dogs with separation anxiety are also often quite excited and aroused when the owner returns.
The first few mock-departures should be identical to the training exercises above, but instead of leaving the room for a few minutes while your dog is calm and distracted, you will begin to leave the home. The first few departures should be just long enough to leave and return without any signs of anxiety or destructiveness. This might last from a few seconds to a couple of minutes; the hardest part and most critical part may be to merely get out the door without your dog becoming anxious. Gradually but randomly increase the time. Your dog must always be relaxed when you begin. Departures must be as much like real departures as possible and include other activities associated with departure such as opening and closing the car door and returning, turning on and off the car engine and returning, or pulling the car out of the driveway and returning. The goal is for your dog to learn that departures are short and that you return quickly, so you must only increase the time you are gone if the dog remains relaxed when you leave the house. The increase in time must be random and slowly increased. You cannot suddenly go from a 5-minute departure to a 30-minute one or your dog may become anxious.
Drug therapy can be useful especially during initial departure training. Tranquilizers alone do not reduce a dog's anxiety and may only be helpful to sedate your dog so that he is less likely to investigate and destroy. Most dogs do best with either fluoxetine or clomipramine over several months, perhaps combined with other antianxiety drugs where necessary.
Sarah Lowe is a clinical psychologist and Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Yale School of Public Health. Last year, Lowe co-authored a research paper that showed how collective action could be a buffer against climate anxiety for young adults, finding that anxiety about climate change was linked to symptoms of depression only in those who were not engaged in group activities to address global warming.
Additionally, it is essential to recognize the relationship between screen time and anxiety. Encourage employees to take breaks not only from work but also from their devices to promote mental well-being and reduce the potential negative effects of prolonged digital engagement.
Well, I'm so glad you you made that pivot, because, you know, I so also clearly remember that day, 9/11, 2001, and just how profound the sense of fear was, how deeply we were all shaken. I can only imagine what it was like to be living in New York City at the time. But I think if we look now, more than 20 years later, we find a profound amount of anxiety. You know, in our communities and our population, not just in the United States, but in other countries as well. So I do think that your focus on anxiety has been is very timely. And one of the things that I would love to to dig into is as we think about this new approach of how to look at anxiety in a more productive way, are there any key principles that you think people can keep in mind to help them make that shift, to use anxiety in ways that can strengthen them and improve their lives?
There are three things, what I call The Three Ls of how to in each moment kind of engage with our anxiety. And The Three L's are: Listen, Leverage and Let go. We often skip to the let go. We just want it to go away. But, but with the three L's, it's, it's actually saying, well, because anxiety is an emotion that's information and preparation to actually get the benefit to negotiate with this ally, instead of treating it like an automatic enemy, we need to understand what that information is. And so we need to build skills and emotional agility in giving anxiety, as you mentioned in the beginning, you know, it's often we were not sure what to call that yucky feeling inside. So we need to, you know, start to to give emotions, those specific words, that emotional granularity that automatically helps us manage them better, to feel less overwhelmed. We need to you know, I know I don't know if this ever happens to you, but I sometimes wake up at three or four in the morning and there worries going through my mind and it just feels like a muddle of yuck. It just is this fog of free-floating anxiety sometimes. When we decide that anxiety is worth listening to and that we need to be sort of lending anxiety an ear like a friend, like it happened this morning. I was had this muddle. I was like, Oh, I'm going to be talking with Vivek later. And there's that my dog might bark. And I was I was thinking about that and what to do. And then something else came to my mind and it sort of slowly rose to the surface, a ball I had dropped at work and I realized, Oh, wait a second, I'd been ignoring this, but my, but my anxiety didn't let me ignore it because it's something I really cared about. And we're only anxious when we care about that future, about our hopes and our dreams. So when I left that, when I gave space to that yucky feeling and allowed that thought to rise, then you get to the second L, which is that you can actually leverage that information. Oh, I dropped that ball at work. Now, I have an opportunity to make some plans. I can take some steps, I can figure out what can I control and what can't I control. And so then we start to actually feel that anxiety isn't just this burden or a sign that we're broken, but it's like this wave that we can ride. It gives us this energy. It doesn't feel good. It has to make us sit up and pay attention so it doesn't feel good. But then as we ride that wave, we can decide, Oh well, I can learn to swim, I can build skills, I can make plans and I can take action. And so it's that opportunity to actually hone us towards purpose and things that matter to us in life, that's that, that we can practice and get better at day by day every time we try.
Absolutely, and thank you for sharing that. Just as you say, it's it's it's giving us this, when we think of emotions as a form of wisdom that can be transformed, now, that doesn't mean that the the suffering that people with anxiety disorders experience is any less real. It doesn't mean that it's, it's not you know, it doesn't negate the fact that this is at this stage debilitating anxiety and that someone has been diagnosed with anxiety disorder. But the fascinating thing is that the solutions remain the same. We're never going to get rid of anxiety. It is a feature of being human. And and it's it's messy, but it's beautiful and it's funny and it's like it's all those things that make us most human. And so even when we struggle with debilitating anxiety, we still need to befriend it, even if we hate it, even if it's really getting in the way. But again, the only way out is through. There's this great research coming out of Yale Child Study Center, and this is really about how parents can support their anxious children. And Eli Lebowitz and colleagues and you might have heard of this this work in this intervention, have developed an intervention called SPACE, which is Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions. I might have missed a word in there somewhere, but it's but it's essentially a training for parents that can either complement or even take the place of direct therapy for children who suffer from anxiety disorders. And the whole, the core of the concept is that we are we are anxious about our children's anxiety. Of course, we want to protect them. But what we actually have to do is prepare them and know that they're not fragile. They're not teacups that will shatter in a million pieces. They're antifragile, that they're more like, that emotions are more like the immune system where you have to challenge them and throw some germs and bacteria at them to actually optimize the functioning of our immune system. Like muscles, you have to strain them sometimes to build strength and emotions are the same way. So what SPACE teaches parents to do when they when their anxious children are refusing to go to school or won't sleep in their own bed or are really struggling is to not allow kids to go around the anxiety, but to slowly and steadily help kids go through the anxiety by scaffolding them to get back to school. And maybe at first you just go to the bus stop and then you come back home and then maybe the next day you go to school for half a day and you but you slowly support your children in making those steps and learning those coping skills instead of accommodating, over accommodating, the anxieties and thus really not allowing them to build those skills.
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