Managing Intense Anxiety Workbook

People who experience intense anxiety are likely to find it difficult to function in everyday life due to the symptoms associated with anxiety. The assessments and activities in this workbook are designed to provide facilitators with a wide variety of tools to use in helping people manage the intense anxiety in their lives more effectively. Many choices for self-exploration are provided for facilitators to determine which tools best suit the unique needs of their clients.

The Managing Intense Anxiety Workbook is designed to be used either independently or as part of an established mental health issue program. You may administer any of the assessments and the guided self-exploration activities to an individual or a group with whom you are working, and you may administer any of the assessments and activities over one or more days. Feel free to pick and choose those that best fit the outcomes you desire.

The purpose of this workbook is to provide facilitators who work with individuals and groups who may be experiencing intense anxiety issues with a series of reproducible activities that can be used to supplement their work with participants. Because these activity pages are reproducible, they can be photocopied as is, or you may adapt them by whiting out and writing in your own changes to suit the needs of each group, using that page as your master-copy to be photocopied for each participant.

The Awareness Modules
The reproducible awareness modules contained in this workbook will help you identify and select assessments and activities easily and quickly:

Module I: Signs of Stress Symptoms
This module will help participants explore the signs of stress in their lives, recognize the symptoms of anxiety, and learn tools to begin to help decrease the anxiety.

Module II: Need for Control
This module will help participants explore the various ways they need to be in control of their lives.

Module III: Social Approval
This module will help participants explore the various ways that their need for the approval of others affects their functioning in social situations.

Module IV: Perfectionism
This module will help participants explore ways that their need to be perfect and mistake-free, as well as their determination to achieve unrealistic standards can cause anxiety.

Module V: Erasing the Stigma of Mental Health Issues
This module will help participants explore the stigma of having intense anxiety and the impact that the stigma has on them.