I. What are Behavioural Exercises to treat anxiety?

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Behavioural Therapy Exercises work to reduce anxiety by helping you change your reactions to stressful or anxiety causing events. When you are continuously and increasingly being exposed to events or subjects you fear and avoid or panic about, you can learn to track and identify these fears and anxieties by using tools to change your reactions to them for a speedier recovery, very similar to the Cognitive Therapy Exercises strategy.

Historically, behavioural exercises and therapies have a broad base of scientific support for their effectiveness in lowering anxiety. With all of the techniques that have been developed, current research has continued to show the success of behavioural exercises, with specific treatments to reduce anxiety for each different disorder. For example:

Written Exposure Therapy is effective in reducing anxiety in people with General Anxiety Disorder
Systematic Desensitization can reduce long-term anxiety symptoms.

Behavioural Techniques can be combined with other exercises and strategies to lessen stress. They can be combined with Cognitive Therapy Exercises so that negative thought patterns and self-talk which lead to avoidance, isolation or other anxious reaction to stressful events can be reduced. Although many behavioural techniques can be done on your own, Social support from partners or therapists can help to fine-tune the behavioural therapy process and to gain feedback from the structured techniques you choose to use.

There are a number of behavioural exercises or techniques for the treatment of anxiety. The exercises you will learn about in this lesson include:

Behaviourial Therapy:
Behavioural therapy is the central process of identifying anxious behaviours to avoid stressful events or to protect oneself from worry and panic, and then applying alternatives to these behaviours to find the most suitable lifestyle change.

Exposure Therapy:
Phobias, or irrational fears, can be addressed by using different levels of exposure (e.g. progressive, or prolonged). You can then learn to remove the psychological connection between stressful events and your response to them. There are three forms of exposure therapy in this lesson including:

Flooding
Written exposure
Prolonged Exposure done with a therapist

Behavioural Experiments:
This exercise uses a one-time exposure process to test the truth of your beliefs around your anxiety-causing event.

Systematic Desensitization:
In this behavioural technique, you will learn to associate a relaxing or humorous response to your anxiety-causing event instead of panic or avoidance.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT):
This therapy combines elements of cognitive exercises with behavioural strategies to change the thinking that leads to anxiety and the behaviour that comes from anxious thoughts.

Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR):
For people who experience anxiety from traumatic events, you can obtain basic information about how Eye Movement Desensitization and Re-processing work with the help of a therapist.

Finding the behavioural tools you can use is based on your own personal experiences with anxiety and lifestyle preferences. You may find that your best option is by simply reading about the strategies and how to incorporate them in your daily life, or you may need to try some or all of them to find out which one works best for your level of anxiety. In the end, you have choices on how you wish to free your life from stress, and these behavioural strategies are some of them.