Peak
07-12-2013, 09:15 AM
I've been suffering from anxiety for a few years now which largely has centered around anxiety over my health. I've recently completed a course of CBT aimed specifically at my health anxiety and it has helped enormously. What it taught me was not to try to cure what I believed to be my symptoms but to view them differently and brake the way I would normally respond to them. The difference this has made has been huge.
One thing does remain though. I've never really liked situations of confrontation or conflict like arguments etc but in recent months this has got worse. Fortunately these aren't situations I encounter regularly but due to their nature when they do occur they tend to occur out of the blue which makes trying to prepare for them really, really hard.
Just the other day I received an e-mail from a friend who was forwarding an e-mail to me about something an ongoing dispute we both have with a club we are members of. The dispute is incredibly minor or at least it would be if another individual wasn't deliberately trying to blow it all up out of all proportion. I had only skim read the first sentence of the e-mail when I had a massive fight or flight response. A huge surge of adrenalin surged through me, blood rushed to my head to the point where I briefly got blurred vision, I started to tremble all over, my heart started to race and beat irregularly (i get ectopic heart beats which have been checked out and all is fine), it felt as though my blood pressure jumped a good 20 points. All of this happened in a split second and whilst the physical symptoms only lasted 20 seconds or so, it left me feeling a bit hyped up for several minutes.
Prior to this an incident at work caused me to get very angry with someone and whilst they were certainly in the wrong, I did overreact which again was largely a fight or flight response and again happened in a split second.
Does anyone have any advice on how to break my response to these triggers as they happen so quickly that I don't really seem to be able to anticipate them.
One thing does remain though. I've never really liked situations of confrontation or conflict like arguments etc but in recent months this has got worse. Fortunately these aren't situations I encounter regularly but due to their nature when they do occur they tend to occur out of the blue which makes trying to prepare for them really, really hard.
Just the other day I received an e-mail from a friend who was forwarding an e-mail to me about something an ongoing dispute we both have with a club we are members of. The dispute is incredibly minor or at least it would be if another individual wasn't deliberately trying to blow it all up out of all proportion. I had only skim read the first sentence of the e-mail when I had a massive fight or flight response. A huge surge of adrenalin surged through me, blood rushed to my head to the point where I briefly got blurred vision, I started to tremble all over, my heart started to race and beat irregularly (i get ectopic heart beats which have been checked out and all is fine), it felt as though my blood pressure jumped a good 20 points. All of this happened in a split second and whilst the physical symptoms only lasted 20 seconds or so, it left me feeling a bit hyped up for several minutes.
Prior to this an incident at work caused me to get very angry with someone and whilst they were certainly in the wrong, I did overreact which again was largely a fight or flight response and again happened in a split second.
Does anyone have any advice on how to break my response to these triggers as they happen so quickly that I don't really seem to be able to anticipate them.