Anxiety manifests as both mental and physical symptoms. When something triggers your anxiety, the subsequent feelings of fear, stress, or irritability can be debilitating. Severe anxiety can have a detrimental effect on your job, social activities, and your enjoyment of day-to-day life.
Understanding the causes of your anxiety helps you understand the specific anxiety triggers you face. This allows you to overcome anxiety triggers and regain control over your thoughts, emotions, conduct, conversations, and behaviors. Read on to learn how to recognize and cope with anxiety triggers with the help of a Licensed Clinical Psychologist.
What Are Anxiety Triggers?
An anxiety trigger refers to a specific situation, action, or person that causes you intense feelings of fear or worry. In severe cases, an anxiety trigger can turn into a panic attack: a sudden and debilitating episode of fear that causes symptoms such as breathlessness, rapid heartbeat, shakiness, sweating, dizziness, and/or nausea. However, it’s important to note that not all anxiety triggers lead to a panic attack. Even if you don’t suffer from panic attacks, anxiety triggers can still present unnecessary challenges and hardship in your day-to-day life.
Common Examples of Anxiety Triggers
There are many potential causes of anxiety triggers. Some examples stem from internal factors, such as medical conditions like heart problems or low blood sugar. Others result from external factors, including public speaking, conflict, or a reaction to substances like caffeine, drugs, medications, or alcohol.
Many people with anxiety share some common anxiety triggers. For example, public speaking is a common fear that can trigger anxiety in countless people with various forms of anxiety or anxiety triggers. However, other triggers will be more personal to your unique experience with your Anxiety Disorder. Specific personal conflicts, various settings from your life (such as your office), or a significant change in your routine can all cause anxiety to flare up.
Beware Maladaptive Coping Techniques
There are several ways to deal with anxiety and stress in your life, but not every technique is beneficial or healthy. Maladaptive coping refers to unhealthy, unsafe, and ultimately detrimental behaviors that you use to manage anxiety, stress, and other negative emotions.
Some maladaptive coping techniques might seem like a good idea at the moment. For example, if social settings or public engagements make you anxious, it can be tempting to cancel your plans for a night out with friends or informal meetings. However, continuously canceling plans puts strain on your relationships and leads to isolation, which only worsens anxiety over time.
Examples of maladaptive coping techniques include self-isolation, substance abuse, disordered eating behaviors, severe procrastination, and self-harm. These behaviors only cause more problems and can lead to the development of comorbid conditions such as Eating Disorders or Addiction Disorders. If you live with anxiety and anxiety triggers, it’s crucial to work with a skilled Licensed Clinical Psychologist to build healthy habits that allow you to overcome your anxiety rather than struggle to cope with debilitating maladaptive behaviors.
How a Licensed Clinical Psychologist Can Help
A Licensed Clinical Psychologist will work with you to treat your anxiety and address anxiety triggers at the source. Through personalized treatment plans and evidence-based therapeutic models, your Licensed Clinical Psychologist helps you build the habits and techniques you need to overcome anxiety triggers adaptively and constructively.
Better Understand Causes of Anxiety
If you want to recognize anxiety triggers, you must first gain a better understanding of your unique experience with your Anxiety Disorder. Your Licensed Clinical Psychologist can analyze the anxiety triggers you experience and other circumstances and experiences revolving around your anxiety. With this information, your skilled Psychologist can work with you to address the causes of your Anxiety Disorder, learn what circumstances trigger anxiety, and navigate the challenges that anxiety creates in your life.
Build Emotional Regulation Skills
The ability to regulate your emotions allows you to handle stressful situations and balance your thoughts and emotions throughout the day. Emotional regulation and modulating affect target the intense fear and worry that comes with anxiety triggers. Emotional regulation takes systematic, methodical, and consistent effort on the part of the patient. Working with a Licensed Clinical Psychologist can help you identify poor emotional regulation patterns and replace them with more constructive techniques to change thought patterns and modify associations in the brain.
Improve Stress Management
Stress exacerbates anxiety. Anxiety triggers often go hand in hand with stressful life events like a breakup, losing a job, moving, or losing a loved one. Like anxiety, stress affects you physically, mentally, and emotionally. Learning effective stress management with the help of your Licensed Clinical Psychologist can help you overcome these symptoms and better handle complex situations when they occur. This, in turn, helps you surmount anxiety triggers and other challenges of your Anxiety Disorder.
Establish Defined, Clear, Firm, and Consistent Boundaries in Different Areas of Life
Conflict, unhealthy relationships, and toxic environments are all examples of anxiety triggers, but you can overcome them by learning to set healthy, adaptive, firm, and consistent boundaries for yourself and others. Setting firm boundaries for yourself isn’t always an easy task, particularly if you were not accustomed to practicing them in your earlier days. A seasoned Psychologist will help you navigate the discomfort and challenge the barriers that prevent you from asserting yourself in healthier ways.
In addition to helping you navigate various anxiety triggers, clear and healthy boundaries also help you avoid codependency in your relationships. This allows you to maintain long-lasting and fulfilling relationships as you navigate your life with independence, confidence, and control.
Conquer Anxiety With Evidence-Based Treatment
Every anxiety experience is unique. That’s why it’s important to seek professional treatment from a Licensed Clinical Psychologist. With a treatment plan tailored to your specific needs and circumstances, you can get the help you need to recognize and cope with anxiety triggers.
A well-trained Psychologist will use evidence-based treatment models to navigate your anxiety disorders and help you build more constructive patterns, behaviors, and habits. Treatments that are effective against Anxiety Disorders include:
- Cognitive Behavioral Treatment (CBT)
- Crisis Intervention Treatment
- Interpersonal Effectiveness
- Psychodynamic
- Psychoanalysis
- Gestalt
Your Doctor will use these therapeutic models and other evidence-based treatments to help you identify and work through your anxiety triggers and panic attacks, to successfully treat your anxiety disorders and regain full control of your life.
Overcome Anxiety Triggers With Blair Wellness Group
If you need an Anxiety Psychologist in the Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Century City, Brentwood, Westwood, Irvine, Newport, Orange County, Huntington Beach, Laguna Beach, Corona Del Mar, Dana Point, Mission Viejo, and Aliso Viejo areas, let Blair Wellness Group help. Dr. Blair has experience treating a variety of Anxiety Disorders with compassion, expertise, and evidence-based treatment models. Find the help you need to overcome anxiety triggers and live a healthier, more balanced life.
