You, Me, and Anxiety-How We Cope Together

Anxiety management can follow three learned patterns: avoid, block, or approach. Avoiders push anxiety triggers aside, focus on eliminating anxious feelings by avoiding situations or numbing emotions with drugs or alcohol. Blockers keep anxiety out of awareness by living within narrow routines, rules, and rigid behaviors, and they ignore or shut down when potentially anxious situations arise. Approachers feel anxiety but treat it as part of learning or problem solving, and they address the situation until the anxiety subsides. In relationships, these styles interact, shaping each other’s responses. Approachers can serve as supportive role models for others.

"We can think of our managing anxiety by one of three basic ways: avoid, block, or approach. Avoiders suppress their anxiety, blockers control it through rigidity, and approachers attack their problems. In relationships, these styles shape each other. Approachers can be a supportive role model for the others."

"As the word implies, folks who tend to avoid their anxiety often push the source to the side, whether it is a situation-like a social event-or a specific problem, like doing their taxes. The feelings of anxiety-the shakiness, the obsessing, the sense of being overwhelmed-are for them the front-burner problem they focus on and try to eliminate-by avoiding the social situation or taxes, or by numbing the feelings with drugs or alcohol."

"While avoiders feel their anxiety, blockers often do not, because they learned long ago how to keep it out of their lives. How do they do this? By staying within a narrow channel of routines, rules, and behaviors-rigidity. And should a potentially anxious situation arise-for example, their partner complains about them-they will literally ignore it or shut down and not hear it."

"Like avoiders, approachers feel their anxiety, but unlike avoiders, they don't simply try to avoid or suppress it. Instead, they've learned to see anxiety as part and parcel of either learning something new-tasks for a new job, for example-or solving a problem-the social situation or doing their taxes. Once they solve the problem, they've learned, the anxiety goes away. This is obviously the best way to handle anxiety."

Read at Psychology Today