Free yourself from anxiety

Along with depression, anxiety is one of the most common forms of mental distress. Although many people experience a mix of both conditions, there are some key differences. When you have depression, you commonly look back at the things that have gone wrong, losses you have endured and that you believe will haunt you for ever. If you suffer from anxiety, you probably exist in the future – looking ahead to events you fear will go horribly wrong. Both are distortions of perfectly natural emotions – sadness and fear – but that doesn't make them any easier to live with.

Anxiety can be crippling, whether it's the chronic shyness that leaves you unable to speak to a member of the opposite sex without blushing and clamming up; or the test anxiety that wakes you at 3am, convinced that your A-levels will be a disaster, despite months of revision. Public-speaking anxiety, which affects millions of people in the UK alone, fills you with dread if you even think about giving a presentation at work, or making a speech at a key conference.

Generalised anxiety disorder (GAD) is a nameless sense of dread that follows you throughout your day, attaching itself to anything that could possibly go wrong. And more serious conditions like obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), any kind of phobia, or post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are all anxiety-related. For example, OCD involves an obsessive anxiety about something going wrong – like a loved one dying or catching a disease – combined with a compulsion to perform ritual tasks like repeating certain words or scrubbing your hands clean over and over. If you don't perform the rituals, you're convinced the thing you fear will come to pass.

'We are, perhaps uniquely among the Earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives.'

Lewis Thomas

The good news is that most anxiety-related conditions can be treated. And the most effective treatment for anxiety is cognitive therapy. More serious conditions will require the help of a skilled cognitive therapist – see the BABCP site to find one in the UK. But cognitive therapy is designed so that anyone can use it. With a little dedication, you can become your own therapist, curing your own social or test anxiety in a matter of weeks.

The Overcoming... series of books shows you how to use cognitive therapy to treat a wide range of conditions. They are all excellent. Also superb is When Panic Attacks: A New Drug-Free Therapy to Beat Chronic Shyness, Anxiety and Phobias, by Dr David Burns, one of the world's leading cognitive therapists. Or try Mind Over Mood: Change How You Feel by Changing the Way You Think, by Dennis Greenberger and Christine Padesky. It's a step-by-step workbook that has helped millions of people around the world.

In the meantime, try this simple breathing exercise, which is a powerful way to reduce stress or anxiety. When we become anxious, our respiration becomes fast and shallow 'chest breathing'. Instead, we need to breathe from the abdomen, which stimulates our relaxation response.

1. Find somewhere private and quiet, then sit comfortably and close your eyes. Place one hand on your chest and the other on your abdomen. As you breathe, notice which hand rises higher. If it's the one on your chest, consciously breathe through your abdomen until the hand on your belly moves with each breath.

2. Exhale through your mouth, then take a slow, deep breath in through your nose for a slow count of four, imagining that you are sucking in all the air in the room.

3. Slowly exhale through your mouth for a slow count of five. As all the air is released, gently contract your abdominal muscles to completely evacuate the air from your lungs.

4. Repeat this cycle four more times for a total of five deep breaths.

5. Once you feel comfortable with this exercise, try it without using your hands. The key here is to breathe slowly and deeply – this has the physiological effect of slowing our heart rate and sending messages to the brain that everything's fine, we can relax.