Can I get self-help for anxiety?

Yes, you can get self-help for anxiety. There are self-help courses based on cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) that can help you decrease your anxiety. Research has shown that CBT-based self-help courses are effective for eradicating anxiety.

These are components that are characteristic of effective, CBT-based, self-help courses for anxiety:

• Relaxation

Relaxation is a key component to a treatment program for anxiety. Without learning relaxation techniques, a self-help course is not effective, as the necessary exposure work is anxiety-provoking at the beginning.

• Exposure

This is the classic intervention for anxiety of “facing your fears.” Exposure work is necessary to overcome your anxiety and your fears. If you keep avoiding a feared object or situation, then your anxiety gets worse, as you never get to find out that your beliefs and thoughts about the situation are not true, and that with facing your fears, your anxiety naturally dissipates on its own. Sure, avoiding your feared situation leads to decreased anxiety…but this is short-lived. Over the long term, your anxiety builds up, and you keep working yourself up about the fear, and your body just continues to harbor all that pent-up nervous energy.

• Thoughts

Addressing behaviors and avoidance is not enough. You also need to address the maladaptive thoughts that make you anxious. It is not the event that makes you anxious…rather, it is your thoughts and beliefs about the event that makes you anxious. So the work with thoughts is to replace the maladaptive thoughts with more adaptive ones- thoughts that are not so negative and opinionated.

There are many self-help courses for anxiety that are merely gimmicks, and do not have evidence that they work. Only self-help courses based on CBT and written by doctors (MD-psychiatrists or PhD-level psychologists) are what research studies have shown to be effective for anxiety.