The Vicious Cycle

Your anxiety is fed through reactions in your body, brain and behaviour. These three elements create a vicious cycle and cause you to have negative emotions. You might, for example, notice a physical sign or even multiple signs of anxiety first (see the list of Physical Symptoms of Anxiety).  This produces adrenaline which then feeds the emotional side of your brain (people will looking at me”, “I won’t be able to cope”). The adrenaline from the emotions in turn feeds/produces a behaviour trait such as having a bad temper or avoidance of people/places/doing things. You may notice the emotion or even the behaviour first but they all interlink.
You can break this cycle by learning to think more positively when you start to become anxious, learning to control the physical symptoms such by carrying out another task or “busying” yourself or even by breaking down what you are worrying about and tackling it in small stages (e.g completing a shopping trip by focusing on finding one item at a time and where it is, or breaking down a report into sections and ticking them off as you go). These ways of managing your anxiety stop the release of adrenaline and will help you to feel better.

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