Reflection from the 3 session online workshop by Newham talking therapies
During these days I joined the ‘First Steps to Change’ pre-recorded webinars offered by Newham talking therapies. The webinars explore some ideas, symptoms and strategies related to anxiety and low mood. It gave me a more systematic understanding of anxiety and CBT( cognitive behavior therapy), which is the most common treatment to deal with anxiety. This journey helped me learn anxiety from medical perspective, and explored the stratigies I would possibly use in my project.
In the first session, the most important thing I learned is what is anxiety. Anxiety is basically a fight or flight mechanism of our body, a normal physiological reaction to a threat. In cavemen period, when our ancestors encountered a saber-tooth tiger, their bodies react within nanoseconds, and although we have moved into the modern world, we have inherited this survival instinct, and “saber-tooth tigers” can be shown in our lives today as a job interview, a speech, etc. For example, when we face a threat, our bodies try to pump adrenal hormones that make us move into fight or flight mode, where our heart beats faster. Our breathing becomes more rapid because we need more oxygen to get to our hands and feet. All of these reactions are designed to make our bodies faster and better in order to respond to a crisis. Anxiety is a useful mechanism when we are trying to survive a tiger attack. Therefore, these physical symptoms brought on by anxiety, although scary to experience, are actually very normal phenomenons.
There are many stressors in our daily lives that can trigger anxiety, such as relationships, family, finances, health, and so on. We may feel stress from both internal and external sources. If we are lucky, we can eliminate stressors, but sometimes we couldn’t, so it’s important to think of solutions as coping mechanisms that prevent us from becoming overwhelmed.
The second thing I learned is “change the vicious cycle”, according to the speaker, thinking, feeling and behavior is a circle: how we think would influence our feeling, both physically and emotionally, and how we feel would influence our behavior, and how we act would eventually reinforce or change our thoughts. So if we trap in a bad ruminate, we would fall into vicious cycle and it would escalate our bad feelings. The speaker also introduced CBT as a goal-oriented and solution focused approach to change our vicious cycle.
In the second session, the speaker introduced the unhelpful thoughts habits that we usually come up with, and encourage people to challenge their negative thoughts, with the way of positive thinking and helpful thinking( minimize our problem).
unhelpful thoughts habits: https://www.getselfhelp.co.uk/docs/UnhelpfulThinkingHabitsWithAlternatives.pdf
The speaker also introduced a useful strategie to help with the unhelpful thoughts habits, which is record our thought and reflect on it, and to see if it’s possible to challenge the negative ones. This tells me that recording and observing emotions as well as reactions is an effective way of helping with anxiety as the first step.
In the third session, the speaker looked at the experience of low mood and how low mood and behaviors feed back the vicious circle. She also introduced the ways of lifting low mood and some sleep tips. What I found very meaningful is “value”, thinking about our values and the things important to us is like creating a compass which guide us to positive directions.
After these three sessions, I understood the basics of anxiety and had a basic knowledge of CBT. I found that CBT is basically a mindset-driven behavioural change. This treatment is very common and effective. At the same time, by understanding its process and principles, I found a useful model for my project: a virtuous circle driven by self-awareness and changing perceptions and actions. While CBT usually comes in the form of talking therapy, my focus is on self-starting methods when people can’t take the step of asking for help, so I will continue to research effective self-observation methods and virtuous thinking and try to find ways to combine them with visualisation in order to create interactive tools that people can use on their own.