Do you need to know how to deal with someone with anxiety issues? Due to the pressures of life, some individuals suffer from severe anxiety and stress. Anxiety can have a major impact on your personal life.
It can interfere with your performance at work, your social life, and personal relationships. If there is someone that you know struggling with these issues, you need to reach out to them.
Offering emotional support is essential to help someone with anxiety. Here are guidelines you can follow to help your loved one cope with this problem.
1. Help Someone With Anxiety By Offering Reassurance
Anxiety is a normal feeling of fear and apprehension, but it can become excessive and intense. It is a nervous disorder that causes severe emotions, symptoms, and sensations. In some situations, a person can have a complete mental breakdown.
To prevent someone from losing his or her mind, you will need to calm them down and offer reassurances that everything is going to be okay. Once the person is calm, the severe levels of anxiety will eventually disappear. You need to be certain that you offer constant support when someone is having anxiety attacks.
2. Learn About Anxiety Disorders
Do you know how to identify the signs of an anxiety disorder? For you to help a friend cope with anxiety issues, you need to learn as much as you can about this mental disorder. This makes it easier for you to understand how a person’s anxiety manifests and how you should manage the issue.
When you learn about the type of anxiety issues your friend is having, you will be in a better situation to offer help.
3. Know What Support to Offer
Learn about the best kind of support to offer a friend that needs help dealing with anxiety. It is common for people to prefer emotional support, especially if they have a fear of abandonment.
For such a difficult situation, it is your responsibility to maintain a close relationship with your friend and understanding the anxiety patterns that occur.
4. Tell Your Friend to Get Professional Help
Checking on your friend might not be enough to resolve the problem. Do not expect to cure your friend’s anxiety without professional help.
Regardless of the type of anxiety disorder, your friend has, you can suggest getting help from a psychologist. When you’re speaking to your friend, make sure you’re sensitive and compassionate about his or her situation. You can even offer to go with your friend to treatment sessions to make the process easier to manage.
5. Offer Ways to Overcome Fear and Anxiety
Anxiety can prevent you from enjoying life and causes you to live in fear every single day. It is normal to be fearful if you’re in a dangerous situation. However, your fear can be so overwhelming that it dominates your entire life.
A person that suffers from anxiety will often avoid doing certain things. Come up with creative ways to help your friend face their fears.
6. Be Positive
Positive thoughts and actions go a long way when you want to help someone you love and care about. Your friend will rely on you to be a comforting source when they are suffering from extreme anxiety.
When your friend is having negative thoughts or feelings about getting better, try to remain positive. No matter how severe the anxiety issues become, you need to be the positive light in your friend’s life.
7. Be Alert
Is your friend suicidal? Overcoming terrible symptoms and emotional battles of anxiety requires work. There are a lot of ups and downs during the healing process.
In some cases, a person will feel like giving up or have suicidal thoughts. That is why you need to be alert when your friend mentions feeling suicidal. These comments are to be taken seriously.
Once your friend mentions committing suicide, contact a mental health facility where you’re guaranteed of getting immediate assistance.
If you’re not equipped to handle such a scary situation, you should leave the issue in the hands of medical professionals.
8. Offer Encouragement
It is easy for someone to lose hope if it’s taking too long to recover from an anxiety disorder. Your encouragement helps your friend to get through this stressful time. The encouragement you constantly offer is beneficial because it fills your friend with positivity and puts him in a better frame of mind.
9. Be Realistic
Try not to rush the healing process for someone with anxiety issues. An anxiety disorder is not a mental health problem that you can fix overnight with simple strategies.
There are no short cuts to remedy this issue.
The best thing you can do for your friend is to be realistic. When you’re realistic, it is easier for your friend to achieve positive behavioral changes.
Remember that you cannot resolve an anxiety disorder without the assistance of mental health specialists. Therefore, you should never attempt to put pressure on someone or try to resolve the problem on your own.
Wrapping Up
Millions of people suffer from some type of anxiety disorder. The good news is they can overcome their anxiety as long as they are willing to receive professional support and guidance.
To help someone with anxiety, be sure to give them the information they need to start their pathway to healing.
If you want to learn how you can overcome your anxiety issues, contact us to request an appointment.
