Mental health articles

anxiety management training

The aim of anxiety management training is to equip a client with a range of coping skills to enable them to have greater control over the levels of anxiety they experience. Anxiety management training requires the client to be an active participant in their treatment, undertaking homework tasks, practising techniques and strategies. Training programmes using a cognitive behavioural approach have been found to be the most effective treatment approach (National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence 2004b). Training can be undertaken on an individual or group basis. Group-based treatments are often undertaken as a closed-group course  over six to ten sessions.

anxiety management training.An anxiety management course will include the following elements:

• psycho-education: accurate information about anxiety

• skills acquisition: learning coping techniques and strategies

• application: putting training into action (Miller et al. 1981).

The interventions that are used to counter the components of the service user’s

spiral of anxiety are:

• cognitive (negative thoughts): education regarding the nature of anxiety and its different components and the anxiety spiral, cognitive restructuring to recognise,

evaluate and modify anxious thoughts

• behavioural (avoidance of anxiety-provoking stimuli): systematic desensitization and graded exposure to feared situations, role play and practising coping

strategies for particular situations are helpful

• physiological (autonomic response): practise relaxation and breathing control; it includes techniques and encouragement to undertake relaxing activities (e.g.

swimming, yoga, listening to music).

Tags: anxiety, training