What Are the Treatments for Stress Anxiety?

Your boss just gave you a shorter deadline for a project. Your wife calls and says the in-laws are coming over unexpectedly. Although these situations would ordinarily cause stress and anxiety, those feelings may go away once the moments have passed. That is not always the case with anxiety patients, who could still feel the symptoms long after the family has left and the project is completed. Fortunately there are treatment options for stress-induced anxiety.

Stress-Induced Anxiety

• Anxiety as a diagnosis means that the otherwise normal worries about situations past and present begin to interfere with everyday life. Interference and symptoms can include lack of good sleep, high muscle tension, irritability, lack of concentration and obsessive negative thinking. Although anxiety can manifest itself in different subtypes like panic attacks or phobias, stress-induced anxiety is often situational for things like unexpected workloads or family emergencies.

Medications

• Medications may be the first line of treatment if symptoms are extreme. Mental health professionals might prescribe anti-anxiety medications that reduce the stress hormones and neurotransmitters and stimulate the calming ones. Xanax works by enhancing gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA), which induces calm by slowing down the racing nerve signals causing anxiety. This causes sleepiness and muscle relaxation, but it also can allow the stress-induced patient to better receive talk therapy.

Automatic Negative Thoughts

• Part of cognitive behavioral therapy for anxiety patients involves the control of automatic negative thoughts. In anxiety patients, these thoughts immediately come to mind when presented with a situation such as having to conduct a short-notice meeting. Automatic negative thoughts may lead patients to think they will fail at the meeting, be unprepared or embarrass themselves. Psychotherapists help patients by training them to acknowledge these thoughts and eliminate them by counteracting them with positive, more realistic ones.

Progressive Muscle Relaxation

• Stress and anxiety often have physical symptoms such as constantly tense muscles. This tension can prevent a patient from getting good sleep, which adds to restlessness and irritability. One way to treat the muscle tension is through progressive muscle relaxation. The patient starts by breathing deeply and choosing a muscle group such as the shoulders. He tenses them up and holds for 10 seconds, and then relaxes them while exhaling. The patient moves onto other muscle groups until the entire body has been relaxed.

Exercise

• The benefits of exercise are both mental and physical for stress-induced anxiety patients. Mentally, exercise can be a healthy distraction to the sources and triggers of anxiety. Good exercise also leads to better sleep. It also contributes to building confidence. Physically, exercise stimulates the production of endorphins, the feel-good hormones for the body. It can also reduce levels of cortisol, which contributes to muscle tension.