Let's shed some light on understanding anxiety to celebrate Mental Health Awareness Month. After all, anxiety affects everyone. Every human being on this planet, across cultures, genders, age groups, socioeconomic groups, and all other groups of people, experiences anxiety. To be sure, not everyone has an anxiety disorder, but anxiety itself is part of the human condition. Therefore, it makes sense that during Mental Health Awareness Month we increase our understanding of anxiety. By doing so we celebrate. We celebrate being human and having the ability to take charge of our mental health despite anxiety.

Is it time to rethink anxiety and its purpose or meaning in your life? What is your current perspective on anxiety? Beyond that, what is your relationship with your anxiety? When we live with anxiety or an anxiety disorder, it’s quite normal to struggle against it and fight, argue, and curse it—all in an attempt to make the anxiety go away. From this perspective, anxiety can be an abusive bully or a prison guard. Viewing anxiety this way leads to thoughts and emotions that are rooted in anger, resentment, and other negative reactions that affect your actions. Here's an exercise to help you rethink anxiety and do wonders for how you feel and live your life.

Ever so often, trying new anxiety management strategies is a good idea because anxiety has a way of sticking around long past when its welcome. Dealing with symptoms of anxiety day after day can be discouraging. When you’ve tried anxiety management strategies but anxiety still hangs on, it might be time to switch your approach. Most likely, you’re well aware of the need to try new ways to reduce anxiety. So often with anxiety, we know what we need to do, but because anxiety takes control of our thoughts, emotions, and actions, we feel stuck. The list that follows contains ideas for managing old anxiety symptoms with new anxiety management strategies.

If you're asking yourself, "Do I need therapy for anxiety?", this article will help you find an answer. Anxiety therapy can be extremely helpful in reducing anxiety and taking back the person you know you are and miss having around. As bad as anxiety can be, we often are unsure of whether or not we need therapy for anxiety. We wonder if we’re making too big of a deal out of things. Should we just keep trying to deal with anxiety symptoms by ourselves? Wondering when to enlist the help of a therapist is common. This checklist can be a useful tool in deciding whether you need therapy for anxiety or not.

Being hard on yourself is an unfortunate effect of anxiety. We blame ourselves for this and we chastise ourselves for that. We ruminate about the past and beat ourselves up with worry. We fear things that might happen in the future because we think we’re not good enough to handle this or that. Being so hard on yourself cannot only be an effect of anxiety, but it can also cause increased anxiety. Anxiety and self-hatred exacerbate each other so that it seems that we’re stuck in this awful place forever. In reality, you don’t have to always be so hard on yourself. There are ways to stop and to even start liking yourself.

I’m frequently asked about my favorite anxiety-reduction techniques. On one hand, choosing approaches to overcoming anxiety is difficult because there are so many different tools and techniques. Also, each and every one of us is a distinct individual and our experience with anxiety is unique. That said, I do, indeed, have favorite anxiety-reduction techniques. Here’s a look at my favorites and why I love them.

Anxiety facts can help with one of the most maddening things about anxiety. That is, anxiety makes you feel like you don’t understand yourself anymore. If your anxiety has lasted for a long time, you might feel that you’ve never fully understood yourself. You know you feel terrible: worried, fearful, stressed, and gripped by a cycle of rumination and overthinking. You’re pretty sure it’s anxiety, but you check and double check references to be sure because you wonder if it’s actually anxiety or something else. These five anxiety facts might help you understand yourself and your own anxiety.

Head injury and anxiety (and other mental health-related consequences like depression and posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD]) are related, and neuroscientists are increasingly understanding and able to explain why. What they are discovering is that concussions can cause new anxiety, and they can worsen existing anxiety. This relationship between head injury and anxiety is important.

You probably want to control anxiety attacks and panic attacks because they are frightening experiences that make anyone who has them feel out of control. Of course people feel out of control with anxiety attacks. They are all-consuming. It’s as if the world shrinks around us like cling wrap -- squeezing, crushing, and suffocating us. And at the very same time, panic attacks make the world feel like it’s growing bigger and bigger so that there’s nothing to ground us, leaving us to spiral dizzyingly out of control. Is it even possible to control this terrible aspect of anxiety? Happily, there is. This checklist can be your guide to control anxiety attacks or panic attacks.

Saying goodbye has never been easy for me. Usually, I would obsess over my decision to stop blogging on this website. Unfortunately, I just don’t have the time to devote to writing that I would like because of my full-time job and family responsibilities.